The Environmental Protection Agency’s methane rules are on target.

It’s been two years since Colorado adopted rules aimed at reducing methane emissions from oil and gas wells — and now the federal government is beginning to catch up.

The Environmental Protection Agency this month released final regulations to control leaks of methane gas from new oil and gas wells, and the Bureau of Land Management will finalize rules for wells under its jurisdiction this summer.

Both agencies are moving in the right direction. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas and yet can be controlled without excessive burdens on the industry, as Colorado is proving.

And the economics of detecting methane leaks from tanks, pneumatic devices, pipelines and other equipment is only going to get more costeffective in coming years.

In fact, Colorado’s experience suggests the EPA could have gone further, since this state’s methane rules are stronger in two respects. First, Colorado addresses both new and existing facilities (the EPA will get to existing facilities later). Second, the state requires most wells to be inspected quarterly, with some as often as once a month, depending on how much they produce. The EPA mostly requires semiannual inspections.

And frequency matters, since leaks can spring up any time. It’s not possible to predict when, for example, a seal on a hatch might be vulnerable.

Dan Grossman, director of state programs for the Environmental Defense Fund and a former Colorado lawmaker, says the EPA and BLM regulations are important because while some states are following Colorado’s example in tackling methane, others are not.

And yet, he maintains, “this is the best bargain” both for air quality and greenhouse gas abatement. Moreover, repairing leaks actually increases the supply of natural gas, offsetting some of the regulatory cost.

Since Colorado adopted its methane rules, the Air Pollution Control Division has determined “the state has seen about a 75 percent decline in the number of sites that require fixes,” Colorado Public Radio recently reported. And that percentage will grow as the ability to detect leaks improves with evolving technology.

Patrick Van Bargen of the Center for Methane Emissions Solutions, a trade group for companies engaged in leak detection and repair, told The Denver Post recently that he believes detection technology will become dramatically cheaper in a few years. While today’s hand-held wands and infrared gas-imaging cameras are effective, the hope is that spectrometer technology will produce small, light yet accurate detection devices.

Eventually permanent surveillance for leaks may become a cost-effective proposition.

Van Bargen points out that Colorado already is headquarters to dozens of companies in the leak-detection business, and this number is likely to increase given the federal rules — which is another benefit of Colorado acting first.