On March 8, the Biden Administration took a major step towards curtailing methane emissions from the oil and gas sector by publishing its expansive rule to reduce the potent climate pollutant.

First announced in early December by Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan at the United Nations climate talks in Dubai, the rule is scheduled to take effect 60 days after publication, or sometime in May.

According to the EPA, the final rule will avoid an estimated 58 million tons of methane emissions from 2024 to 2038. That’s nearly 80 percent less than projected methane emissions without the rule, and the equivalent of 1.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO₂) — nearly equal to CO₂ emissions from U.S. power plants in 2021. The rule will also avoid 16 million tons of smog-forming volatile organic compound emissions and 590,000 tons of hazardous air pollutants tied to cancer and other health risks, according to EPA.

Methane is the second most abundant human-caused greenhouse gas after CO₂, accounting for about 16 percent of global emissions. It is also more than 28 times as potent as CO₂ at trapping heat in the atmosphere. However, that heat dissipates much faster than the heat trapped by CO₂, making reducing methane emissions critical in achieving near-team climate targets within the U.S. and internationally as established by the Paris Agreement.

Aerial surveillance over the Permian and Bakken oilfields has demonstrated that flares release significantly more methane than the EPA has assumed, due largely to inefficient combustion. However, the EPA missed a major opportunity to fix this problem in the recently adopted rule by failing to require the destruction of at least 98 percent of the methane in waste gases that are sent to flares. The EPA has insisted since the 1980s that properly operated flares can achieve this destruction efficiency.

But the final rule states that flares need only destroy 95 percent of the methane in waste gases. Flares that comply with the new rule’s weaker standard will release two and a half times more methane than flares that destroy 98 percent of this pollutant.  

The EPA’s new rule also failed to require relatively low-cost monitoring needed to make sure that flares are burning cleanly and efficiently. Specifically, monitoring of “net heating value” can be discontinued if two weeks of sampling yield acceptable results, with five years before any additional sampling is required. Without continuous monitoring, experience has demonstrated that combustion efficiencies deteriorate over time or in response to changes in waste gas composition or operating conditions. That means that flares eventually end up releasing far more pollution than is measured during a single two-week sampling episode that can be rigged to produce favorable results.  

The EPA’s final rule also failed to remedy another problem that the Environmental Integrity Project and four other environmental groups pointed out in comments submitted in February 2023. While the rule requires reduced flaring at oil wells, it does not require storage vessel (or tank) facilities to minimize their use of flaring. Requiring storage vessel facilities to minimize their use of flares is important because these facilities can emit large amounts of methane and VOCs through their flares, including in situations when downstream processing facilities are shut down for repair or other reasons.

Jon Goldstein, who leads the Environmental Defense Fund’s federal methane efforts, said this marks the first time that there will be EPA requirements on older, existing sources of oil and gas methane pollution, including regular leak inspections. Across the country there are more than 750,000 wells that fall into this “existing source” category.  

The federal rule expands and strengthens existing methane emissions rules in several industry-heavy states, including New Mexico and Texas, which share the Permian Basin, the most prolific oil-producing region in the U.S. Goldstein said the important thing now is to make sure the rule is enforced at the state level as soon as possible.

“Under the Clean Air Act, states are given the opportunity to adopt and implement requirements on existing sources,” Goldstein said. “The EPA has given them two years to propose implementation plans, and we will be working to ensure those are strong and finalized in a speedy manner. For states that don’t propose a plan, or proposal a lackluster one, EPA will issue a federal implementation plan.”

Romany M. Webb, deputy director at The University of Columbia’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, said state methane rules vary in scope, content, and how they are enforced, so having this "federal backstop" is important to ensure emissions are effectively controlled.

“The oil and gas sector is currently the largest industrial source of methane in the U.S., and there are many cost-effective ways of reducing methane emissions in the sector,” she said. “Given that, one might expect the industry to act voluntarily, but progress has been slow, so having federal regulations in place to drive down emissions is hugely important.”

The new rule also creates a “super emitter” program to help identify and target abnormally large methane releases. According to the rule, recent studies indicate that a small portion of methane emissions sources contribute almost half of the methane emissions in the oil and gas sector. EPA staff will use remote sensing technologies such as satellites and helicopter flyovers, which are already being conducted over the Permian Basin, to collect data on these super emitting sites.  

A 2021 aerial survey by Carbon Mapper detected 533 methane super emitters in the Permian Basin alone, including pipeline compressors, tank batteries, flare stacks, and other production infrastructure.

James Goodwin, a senior policy analyst with the Center for Progressive Reform, said the super emitter program builds on a long tradition in U.S. environmental law of enlisting the public to support enforcement.

“The nature of the oil and gas industry is that they can be pretty geographically remote, making close supervision by government enforcement officials difficult to achieve in practice,” said Goodwin. “The public can and should help fill this gap.”

Lead photo: Burning excess natural gas at a crude oil storage site. Photo by Sean Hannon, iStockphoto.