S.F. judge upholds methane gas limits

A San Francisco federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to enforce limits on emissions of climate-changing methane gas from wells on federal and tribal lands, saying the benefits to public health and the environment far outweigh the minimal costs to oil and gas companies of reducing pollution.

“Weighed against the likely environmental injury, which cannot be undone, the financial costs of compliance are not as significant as the increased gas emissions, public health harms, and pollution,” U.S. District Judge William Orrick III said in a ruling late Thursday.

He told the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to end its suspension of rules approved by President Barack Obama’s administration that require oil and natural gas producers on federal lands to reduce flaring and venting that lower gas production and leak methane, a potent source of greenhouse gases. The rules took effect in January 2017, but the Trump administration ordered them suspended last month for a year while it developed its own regulations.

Those rules were announced this week. They include a repeal of the Obama regulations and

an elimination of restrictions on methane emissions.

Orrick’s order applied only to the previous regulations and not to any new rules. So the Bureau of Land Management, after receiving public comments for the next 60 days, and responding to them, could put its plan into effect by late spring or early summer. But it would then face more lawsuits.

“They are dead set on revoking obligations on oil and gas operators at any expense to the climate, to the communities or to the air,” said Laura King, an attorney with the Western Environmental Law Center who took part in the court case. “They have got to be seeing that they are on the wrong side of the law.”

Orrick’s reasoning “will apply to the next case as well,” said Michael Saul, a lawyer with the Center for Biological Diversity, which also participated. Of particular importance, he said, was the judge’s finding of “a lack of facts or figures to support the BLM’s alleged concern with costs to operators.”

The ruling came in suits by 17 environmental and tribal groups and by the states of California and New Mexico. California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said Friday that the ruling should remind President Trump and his administration that “they are not above the law.”

The administration was joined in the case by oil and gas industry associations and by the states of Texas and North Dakota, which supported suspension of the methane rules. None of them responded to requests for comment.

Orrick’s ruling was the third, by three different federal courts, to maintain the methane restrictions.

In January 2017, a federal judge in Wyoming rejected requests by industry groups and four states to block the Obama administration rules. Their lawsuit, which claims the rules invaded the authority of both the states and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, is still pending.

In October, U.S. Magistrate Elizabeth Laporte of San Francisco ruled that the Trump administration had acted illegally in trying to halt enforcement of the methane rules, and had failed to consider either the environmental benefits or the potential increase in revenue by reducing waste emissions.

In announcing its subsequent plan to suspend the rules, the Bureau of Land Management said the methane restrictions “unnecessarily encumber energy production, constrain economic growth, and prevent job creation.”

But Orrick said the bureau had presented virtually no evidence to contradict the extensive findings by Obama administration officials, who issued their rules after more than two years of study.

Orrick said the current administration’s argument that the flaring restrictions would hurt small oil and gas operators, and force shutdown of some wells, was contradicted by evidence that their profit margins would be affected by less than two-tenths of 1 percent. He said the administration’s forecast of financial losses to tribes and the government disregarded earlier evidence to the contrary as well as the economic benefits of less pollution.

In addition, Orrick said, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who invited public comments before suspending the flaring rules, refused to consider any comments on the merits of the rules.

“It appears that BLM is simply casually ignoring all of its previous findings (under Obama) and arbitrarily changing course,” Orrick said.