First Posted: 1/19/2015
JANUARY 18, 2015 — As natural gas production has risen, the industry’s emissions of methane — its product’s primary component — have fallen by 73 percent at fracked wells just from 2011 to 2013, the EPA says. That the Obama administration nevertheless will require energy producers to cut 2012-level methane emissions by up to 45 percent by 2025 shows this proposed rule is driven by politics, not science.
Thus, the howls that the rule “doesn’t go far enough” show just how extreme some environmentalists are. They’re upset because it would apply only to new and modified facilities. But existing facilities achieved that 73-percent reduction driven by market incentives, not EPA diktats. As America’s Natural Gas Alliance says, “methane is … the product we sell and, therefore, want to capture.”
The American Petroleum Institute (API) says the rule “could actually slow down industry progress” on methane emissions with “another layer of burdensome requirements.” Heartland Institute scholar H. Sterling Burnett says that burden would fall on what’s already the world’s cleanest oil and gas production industry, despite no study showing that current emissions threaten “public health or the environment.”
With methane accounting for just 2 percent of total so-called greenhouse gas emissions, as API notes, this truly is, as the Marcellus Shale Coalition reminds, “yet another Washington solution in search of a problem.”
