The Trump administration is scrapping limits on methane leaks, allowing oil and gas companies to decide how much of the potent greenhouse gas can escape into the atmosphere from wells, pipelines and storage tanks.
The new rules, issued by the Office of Management and Budget, effectively rescind the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate methane, the largest component of natural gas. Although it dissipates faster than carbon dioxide, methane is estimated to be at least 25 times and as much as 80 times more potent in terms of trapping heat in the atmosphere.
The administration said methane would now be regulated under the Clean Air Act like other volatile compounds, but the rules governing those smog-forming compounds are comparatively weak. EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler signed the new rules in Pittsburgh, in a battleground state that has the most extensive shale gas resources in the country.
“EPA has been working hard to fulfill President Trump’s promise to cut burdensome and ineffective regulations for our domestic energy industry,” Wheeler said in a news release.
“Today’s regulatory changes remove redundant paperwork, align with the Clean Air Act, and allow companies the flexibility to satisfy leak-control requirements by complying with equivalent state rules’’, the statement added.
The current regulations date to 2016 and are among environmental protections crafted by the Obama administration that President Trump has systematically reversed. The Trump administration has sought since 2019 to eliminate methane limitations because many of the small- and mediumsized companies in the oil and gas business — among the president’s ardent supporters — want to reduce the cost of complying with regulations.
The American Petroleum Institute and the Independent Petroleum Association of America said their members could still choose whether to further reduce emissions. A handful of the biggest oil and gas companies, meanwhile, supported the Obama-era rules because they meant the companies could capture and sell methane that would otherwise escape into the atmosphere.
Those companies said they would continue those practices, even if they are no longer required by the government. Methane concentrations in the atmosphere have been rising since the industrial revolution — they are now 150 percent higher than they were in the year 1750, according to the Global Carbon Project, growing from around 700 to over 1,850 parts per billion.
The rate of increase has been particularly sharp over the past roughly 15 years. Atmospheric methane levels began a rapid rise in 2007. In 2019 alone, atmospheric concentrations of methane increased by 10 parts per billion, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That was the fourth-biggest increase in the past three decades.