Several groups that often are at odds over environmental rules are on the same side when it comes to easing methane regulations at oil and gas sites.
The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection joined major oil and gas companies, environmental groups and lawmakers from both parties last week in urging the Trump administration not to go through with its proposal to eliminate methane control requirements from well sites and pipelines across the country.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to roll back rules adopted in 2016 that require companies to identify and stop methane leaks from new and modified oil and gas production, pipeline and storage equipment.
The agency said existing controls on a separate class of chemicals that is also present in oil and gas — called volatile organic compounds, or VOCs — make direct regulation of methane redundant and unnecessary.
The agency is also proposing an alternate rule to exempt the oil and gas storage and transmission sector from both the methane and volatile organic compound regulations.
But major companies that would see restrictions lifted on their operations if EPA finalizes the rule — including Royal Dutch Shell, ExxonMobil, Total, Equinor and Canonsburg-based Equitrans Midstream — wrote that they want national rules directly targeting methane.
Several of the companies said that easing methane regulations will erode public confidence in natural gas as a cleaner fossil fuel at a time when addressing climate change is an international priority.
Comments on the proposals were due last week.
“It is a remarkably rare event in which we feel compelled to comment, on an individual basis, on an EPA rulemaking proceeding,” wrote French energy giant Total, which has extensive operations in the United States. “But in this instance, EPA’s proposed action has the potential to undermine the significant actions that Total and others are taking to address the risks associated with global climate change.”
Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas that traps 86 times more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide in the first two decades after it is released, making it a key target in efforts to mitigate climate change.
Pennsylvania has its own methane rules for new and modified oil and gas equipment that are already more restrictive in some ways than the federal rules the EPA wants to relax.
DEP Secretary Patrick McDonnell wrote that relying on VOC controls to minimize the release of methane, as the EPA proposes, would leave some sources unchecked.
DEP adopted specific methane limits when it updated its rules for new wells and equipment in 2018 because much of Pennsylvania’s natural gas contains too few volatile organic compounds to trigger a standard based on VOCs alone, he wrote.
Without a methane standard, some equipment, such as storage vessels and pneumatic pumps, may “emit large amounts of methane without triggering the VOC control threshold,” he wrote.
The comment is notable because DEP is in the process of developing new rules for thousands of existing oil and gas wells that would not control methane directly. In that proposal, Pennsylvania regulators argue that VOC controls will indirectly limit methane emissions as a co-benefit.
Supporters of the EPA’s rule change include oil and gas industry trade groups, including the powerful American Petroleum Institute, even as some of its largest members stake the opposite position.
GPA Midstream Association, which represents 80 companies that gather and process natural gas after it leaves well sites, wrote that withdrawing the methane rules “would eliminate redundant regulations that provide no benefits to the public and cannot justify the additional costs and burdens on industry.”
Opponents of the rule change include at least seven of Pennsylvania’s 18 Congressional representatives, including Republican Brian Fitzpatrick of Bucks County, as well as Senator Bob Casey, a Democrat.
A group of 20 state attorneys general, including Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, wrote that the rollback will unravel rules that haven’t even been drafted.
When EPA crafts a regulation to limit pollution from newly built sources, by law the agency must then write a regulation to control that same pollutant from existing sources. By dropping its methane regulations on new wells, the EPA would also erase its obligation to control methane from wells that existed prior to 2016.
Existing oil and natural gas sources emitted over 33 million metric tons of methane over the last three years, the attorneys general wrote, “equivalent to the climate impact of over 600 million passenger vehicles driven for one year.”
If the 2016 methane rules for new sources had applied to existing sources over that period, they wrote, 37% of those emissions would have been prevented.
First Published: December 2, 2019, 10:15 p.m.
