Emails show energy industry’s quick steps on methane rule
WASHINGTON — Not long after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the head of a fossil-fuels industry group requested a call with the president’s transition team. The subject: Barack Obama’s requirement that oil and gas companies begin collecting data on their releases of methane.
That outreach, by Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Western Energy Alliance, appeared to quickly yield the desired results.
“Looks like this will be easier than we thought,” David Kreutzer, an economist who was helping to organize the new president’s Environmental Protection Agency, wrote of canceling the methane reporting requirement in an email to another member of the transition team on Feb. 10, 2017.
Three weeks after that email, the EPA officially withdrew the reporting requirement — and effectively blocked the compilation of data that would allow for new regulations to control methane, a powerful climate-warming gas.
The emails are included in hundreds of pages of EPA staff correspondence and interviews recently made public in a lawsuit that 15 states have filed against the agency over the regulation of methane. Led by Massachusetts and New York, the states say the documents prove that fossil-fuel industry players, working with allies in the early days of Trump’s EPA, engineered the repeal of the methane reporting requirements with no internal analysis, then created the rationale for the decision after the fact.
That repeal, the states assert, illegally delayed the development of additional regulations to reduce methane emissions that the administration did not want.
If the states succeed, a judge could, as early as this summer, order the federal government to impose restrictions on thousands of oil and gas wells, storage facilities and pipelines across the United States. Just last week, a federal court, restoring an Obama-era regulation, struck down a Bureau of Land Management effort to weaken restrictions on methane gas releases from drilling on public lands.
Methane, which leaks from oil and gas wells, accounts for about 10% of greenhouse gas emissions from human activity in the United States, according to EPA data. But studies indicate it is about 30 times more potent over the course of a century than carbon dioxide in altering the Earth’s climate and is responsible for about a quarter of man-made global warming.
‘WE’VE GOT THE RECEIPTS’
Several attorneys general have filed a motion for summary judgment with the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Columbia asking it to compel the EPA to set new standards.
“From the start, we’ve known the Trump Administration has been more interested in greasing the skids for the fossil-fuel industry to make billions than protecting the health of our communities, and now we’ve got the receipts,” said Maura Healey, the attorney general of Massachusetts.
James Hewitt, an EPA spokesman, declined to comment on the substance of the lawsuit’s allegations, saying in a statement the agency intended to file its response by Aug. 14.
Sgamma and Kreutzer said that, because it was clear that the Trump administration would have a different policy on methane from the Obama administration, career staff members at the EPA agreed that continuing with a requirement to collect data on releases of methane no longer made sense.
“It would have been a waste of time to submit data that weren’t going to be used,” Sgamma said of her email. “I merely called this to their attention.”
Obama’s 2015 methane regulation required companies to install technology to detect and fix methane leaks in all new and heavily modified facilities.
Under the Clean Air Act, when the EPA moves to regulate pollution from new sources, the agency also must develop pollution standards for existing sources. In preparation for developing a second regulation for existing facilities, the agency in late 2016 required companies to report information about their emissions, their equipment and their methane controls. The so-called information collection request became known as the ICR.
According to the emails made public in the lawsuit, Sgamma reached out to Kreutzer on Feb. 2. “I know you’re under water right now,” she wrote, but she hoped they might find time to talk about the reporting requirement that she said was creating “confusion” for companies.
The two spoke and on Feb. 10 Sgamma followed up with another email outlining “key rationales” for eliminating the reporting requirement, or to allow companies more time.
EPA CONTACTS
“It seems unlikely that the new EPA will approach this ‘existing’ source regulation in the same way,” Sgamma wrote. If the agency is not likely to regulate current sources of methane, she added, “then it does not make sense for every operator in the country to go through this burdensome information request.”
That day, Kreutzer called Sarah Dunham, then the acting administrator of the EPA’s air office, and contacted David Schnare, a longtime opponent of climate science and another member of the EPA transition team.
In an afternoon email to Dunham with the subject line “Re: Quashing the ICR,” Kreutzer asked her to draft a request to withdraw the methane information collection.
On March 2, the EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, formally announced the immediate withdrawal of the information request.
“Today’s action will reduce burdens on businesses while we take a closer look at the need for additional information from this industry,” he said.
The agency later said the decision brought the EPA into compliance with Trump’s executive order to roll back his predecessor’s climate-change regulations — but that executive order was issued March 28, almost a month after the agency had stopped collecting data.