EPA halts inquiry into methane emissions
Move is step toward reversing Obama initiative to gather info from oil, gas industry
The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday announced it was withdrawing a request that operators of existing oil and gas wells provide the agency with extensive information about their equipment and its emissions of methane, undermining a lastditch Obama administration climate change initiative.
The EPA announcement was a first step toward reversing an Obama administration effort — which only got underway two days after Donald Trump’s election — to gather information about methane, a short-lived but powerful climate pollutant that is responsible for about a quarter of global warming to date.
The agency cited a letter sent by the attorneys general of several conservative and oil-producing states complaining that the information request “furthers the previous administration’s climate agenda and supports … the imposition of burdensome climate rules on existing sites, the cost and expense of which will be enormous.”
Scott Pruitt, the EPA administrator, said the agency took those complaints seriously. “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 in a statement.
Environmental advocates saw the move as something else entirely.
“With this action, Administrator Pruitt is effectively telling oil and gas companies to go ahead and withhold vital pollution data from the American public,” said Mark Brownstein, vice president climate and energy at the Environmental Defense Fund. “This was a good faith effort on the part of the agency to collect additional information on oil and gas industry operations and the pollution that comes from them. [Now], it’s a complete lack of transparency.”
The EPA announcement further advances efforts by the White House and Republicans in Congress to undo the Obama administration’s efforts to regulate emissions from oil and gas production.
Congress, through the Congressional Review Act, is already moving to dismantle an Interior Department regulation, finished very late in the Obama administration, that would have restricted methane emissions from wells drilled on public lands in particular. The EPA did not issue its request for information from companies until Nov. 10, two days after Donald Trump was elected president.
Industry officials were quick to applaud Thursday’s action.
“The exercise imposed significant costs on companies to produce additional paperwork and added unnecessary burdens on producers’ technical teams to prepare and submit rushed comments under enormous time constraints,” said Lee Fuller, executive vice president of the Independent Petroleum Producers of America, in a statement.
But the EPA announcement could result in the U.S. emitting more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere in coming years. At the very least, it means the country will not be tracking those emissions as closely.
Not everyone, however, thinks that withdrawing an information request is the same as an intention not to regulate.
“The withdraw doesn’t necessarily means that the Trump folks are not planning to regulate methane from existing oil and gas operations,” said Jeffrey Holmstead, a former EPA deputy administrator and an attorney with Bracewell LLP, which has clients in the energy industry. “They may well come out with a less burdensome request at some point, but they needed to withdraw the Obama request right away to ensure that the industry wouldn’t be forced to spend a lot of money to produce information that may not be necessary.”