Curbs on Methane, Potent Greenhouse Gas, to Be Relaxed in U.S.

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The Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed rule aims to eliminate federal requirements that oil and gas companies install technology to detect and fix methane leaks from wells, pipelines and storage facilities. It would also reopen the question of whether the E.P.A. had the legal authority to regulate methane as a pollutant.

The rollback plan is particularly notable because major energy companies have, in fact, spoken out against it — joining automakers, electric utilities and other industrial giants that have opposed other administration initiatives to dismantle climate-change and environmental rules.

The weakening of the methane standard is the latest in the march of environmental-policy rollbacks by the Trump administration designed to loosen regulations on industry.

Mr. Trump has sought to open millions of acres of public land and water to drilling, including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and has lifted an Obama-era moratorium on new coal mining leases on public land. This month, the Interior Department completed a plan to weaken the Endangered Species Act. Later this year the E.P.A. plans to roll back clean-water regulations affecting streams and wetlands.

E.P.A. officials said the new methane rule, which would replace one from the Obama administration, is a response to Mr. Trump’s calls to trim regulations that impede economic growth or keep the nation reliant on energy imports. The plan “removes unnecessary and duplicative regulatory burdens from the oil and gas industry,” said the E.P.A. administrator, Andrew Wheeler. “The Trump administration recognizes that methane is valuable and the industry has an incentive to minimize leaks and maximize its use.”

Mr. Wheeler noted that since 1990, natural gas production in the United States has almost doubled while methane emissions across the industry have fallen 15 percent.

Anne Idsal, the agency’s acting senior clean-air official, said that elimination of the Obama-era rules would have “minimal environmental benefits.”

Environmental advocates described the proposal as a major setback in the effort to fight climate change. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas.

“The Trump E.P.A. is eager to give the oil and gas industry a free pass to keep leaking enormous amounts of climate pollution into the air,” said David Doniger, a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group. “If E.P.A. moves forward with this reckless and sinister proposal, we will see them in court.”

Under the proposal, methane, the main component of natural gas, would be only indirectly regulated. A separate but related category of gases, known as volatile organic compounds, would remain regulated under the new rule, and those curbs would have the side benefit of averting some methane emissions.

The new rule must go through a period of public comment and review, and would most likely be finalized early next year, analysts said.

Over all, carbon dioxide is the most significant greenhouse gas, but methane is a close second. It lingers in the atmosphere for a shorter period of time but packs a bigger punch while it lasts. By some estimates, methane has 80 times the heat-trapping power of carbon dioxide in the first 20 years in the atmosphere.

Methane currently makes up nearly 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. A significant portion of that comes from the oil and gas industry. Other sources include cattle and agriculture.

The E.P.A.’s economic analysis of the rule estimated that it would save the oil and natural gas industry $17 million to $19 million a year. For comparison, the annual revenue of the United States oil industry as a whole typically ranges between $100 billion and $150 billion.

The Obama administration’s methane regulation has been a target since Mr. Trump’s earliest days in office. In March 2017, Scott Pruitt, then the E.P.A. administrator, tried to suspend the regulation while the agency considered an alternative, but a federal appeals court ruled the move unlawful.

President Trump has repeatedly dismissed the scientific consensus that human activity is contributing to climate change, even though the federal government’s own scientists have put forth a detailed warning about the damage that global warming is already causing the United States’ economy.

The 2018 National Climate Assessment concluded that the warming caused by greenhouse gases has already led to worsening wildfires and crop failures, among other things, and that by century’s end, effects like these could knock as much as 10 percent off the size of the American economy.

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Erik Milito, a vice president at the American Petroleum Institute, a trade group representing the oil and gas industry, praised the new rule, saying, “We think it’s a smarter way of targeting methane emissions.”

But several of the biggest oil and gas companies have called on the Trump administration to tighten restrictions on methane, not loosen them. It was smaller companies that had sought the weakening of the rules, arguing that leak inspections were too costly.

Larger energy companies have invested millions of dollars to promote natural gas as a cleaner option than coal in the nation’s power plants, because natural gas produces about half as much carbon dioxide when burned. They fear that unrestricted leaks of methane could undermine that marketing message, hurting demand.

Exxon wrote to the E.P.A. last year urging the agency to maintain core elements of the Obama policy. And this year, Gretchen Watkins, the United States chairwoman for Shell, said the E.P.A. should impose rules “that will both regulate existing methane emissions but also future methane emissions.”

Susan Dio, the chairwoman and president of BP America, wrote an op-ed article for The Houston Chronicle in March saying that regulating methane is the “right thing to do for the planet” and for the natural gas industry. “To maximize the climate benefits of gas — and meet the dual challenge of producing more energy with fewer emissions — we need to address its Achilles’ heel and eliminate methane emissions,” she wrote.

Ben Ratner, a senior director with the Environmental Defense Fund, a group that works closely with oil companies to track and reduce methane emissions, said that as renewable energy sources like solar or wind become more affordable, the industry’s message that natural gas is a cleaner alternative is undercut. “The reputation of American natural gas is at the precipice, and methane rollbacks are the shove,” Mr. Ratner said.

Ms. Idsal, the E.P.A.’s acting clean-air chief, said companies that opposed the Trump rollback would be free to keep abiding by the Obama-era rules if they wished. “We don’t preclude anybody from going above and beyond if that’s what they think they need to do from a business or compliance standpoint,” she said.




A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: E.P.A. to Weaken Controls on Gas Tied to Warming. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe