Texas must adhere to Biden methane rule
Dependence on oil and gas is hastening climate impacts across the globe
Wildcatters drilling for oil in the arid, ochre plains of West Texas would appear to have little in common with citizens of a tiny Pacific island nation 6,000 miles away desperately building seawalls out of scrap metal, trash and concrete.
Yet every barrel of oil extracted from the Permian Basin pushes the Marshall Islands a little bit closer to being swallowed by the sea.
The Marshall Islands, an archipelago formed by ancient extinct underwater volcanoes, are locked in a war of attrition wrought by climate change. The islands sit a mere 7 feet above sea level and studies estimate that just one more meter of sea level rise would submerge about 40 percent of the capital city.
How quickly that happens is, in part, dependent on whether the U.S. sustains our pace of record oil and gas production, brought on in part by the Biden administration’s permitting spree for new drilling. When we bore oil and gas wells and build pipelines that leak or intentionally vent methane
— a potent, heat-trapping greenhouse gas 80 times more damaging to the climate than carbon dioxide — we are contributing to the demise of a nation of 42,000 people with outsized importance in culture and biodiversity.
Climate optimists would have you believe that a draft agreement among participating nations at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Dubai this month will help the Marshall Islands avoid this fate. After all, the draft’s mention of a “transition away” from fossil fuel usage is a significant step forward. Yet the document is an aspirational handshake deal with no real enforcement mechanism to ensure polluters meet a soft deadline of 2050 for weaning the global economy off oil, gas and coal.
By that time, according to an adaptation plan released by the Marshall Islands last week, its leaders will have to decide which of its 29 atolls to protect or abandon completely. By 2070, a massive relocation effort will be underway, with only four of its islands projected to be habitable.
“The Republic of the Marshall Islands did not come here to sign our death warrant,” John Silk, the minister of natural resources for the Marshall Islands, said at the conference. “We will not go silently to our watery graves.”
Silk’s words reframe our dependence on fossil fuels. Rarely do we consider how our reliance on dirty energy impacts our international neighbors. Texas’ Permian Basin, the nation’s largest oil and gas field, spewed more than 200 million tons of greenhouse gases into the air last year, according to a U.N.-sponsored study. The unfortunate reality, however, is that the U.S. is still years, perhaps decades, away from kicking our oil and gas fix. If we are going to continue a slow transition toward a renewable energy economy, curtailing greenhouse gas emissions will be crucial in the meantime, and we can’t simply rely on toothless international accords to get it done.
As long as we’re still drilling for fossil fuels, we will need stringent regulations to do it as cleanly as possible. To that end, the most ambitious policy achievement during the U.N. summit didn’t come from the international community, but from our own Environmental Protection Agency. On Dec. 2, Michael Regan, the EPA administrator, announced the Biden administration’s plan to curb methane emissions from the oil and gas sector.
Once finalized, oil and gas companies will be required to phase out routine flaring of natural gas at new oil wells. The rule mandates “comprehensive monitoring” for methane leaks from well sites and will force oil and gas companies to install methane monitoring technologies to detect leaks. It creates standards for reducing emissions from equipment such as controllers, pumps and storage tanks. It will even allow third parties to detect and report large methane releases through its “Super Emitter Program,” codifying the work already being done by nonprofit watchdogs such as the Environmental Defense Fund.
Most importantly, the EPA didn’t carve out any exceptions for small operators, which account for roughly half of the industry’s methane emissions despite producing only 6% of U.S. oil and natural gas. The cost burden for bringing these operators toward compliance will be shouldered in part by a fee on methane emissions from larger producers. Proceeds from that fee will be set aside to help smaller companies access more than $1 billion in financial assistance to comply with the new regulations, a Methane Emissions Reduction Program established by the Inflation Reduction Act.
For this rule to succeed, the state agencies responsible for protecting our environment, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and the Railroad Commission, will need to do their jobs, rather than continuing to give the oil and gas industry licenses to pollute with reckless abandon. While both agencies lobbied against the methane rule, calling it a government “overreach,” state regulators have two years to come up with a plan for implementation.
We applaud the Biden administration for drawing up regulations that balance our short-term energy security with our long-term net zero goals. It also happens to be good for business. Cutting methane emissions will keep our natural gas exports competitive in a global market that is willing pay a premium for low-carbon energy.
As the world’s second-largest carbon polluter, the U.S. must lead by example and then demand other countries follow. The methane rule is a critical step toward limiting global warming and giving nations like the Marshall Islands a fighting chance.