The oil and gas industry says the administration’s bid to cut methane emissions will hurt the president’s climate goals, not help them.
The American Petroleum Institute, representing all aspects of the oil production business, stepped up its opposition Thursday to the administration’s proposed methane cuts, after the White House announced it will tighten greenhouse gas regulations on the oil and gas sector as part of a multinational push with Canada.
“America is already leading the world in reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” said Kyle Isakower, API’s vice president of regulatory and economic policy. “Even as oil and natural gas production has risen dramatically, methane emissions have fallen, thanks to industry leadership and investment in new technologies.”
But moving forward with the administration’s top-down rules to cut the emissions will place a damper on oil and gas production from shale, which has kept energy prices low while leading to historic lows in carbon dioxide emissions, which are blamed for causing manmade global warming, according to Isakower.
“Let’s not forget that the safe and responsible development of energy from shale has helped the U.S. cut [carbon] emissions to near 20-year lows,” he said. “The last thing we need is more duplicative and costly regulations that could increase the cost of energy for Americans and that could potentially drive up greenhouse gas emissions.”
Methane is one of the most potent forms of greenhouse gas emissions, which is why the administration says it is targeting it. Cutting emissions from leaks in the oil and gas supply chain would curb the greenhouse gas, while helping industry save valuable commercial product, the administration argues.
As a part of Thursday’s announced agreement with Canada, the Environmental Protection Agency and Environment and Climate Change Canada will coordinate their work on regulating methane emissions from oil production.
EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy said the EPA would work on gathering information this year from the oil and gas industry on methane emissions to determine where most of the emissions come from. She would not commit, however, to the U.S. issuing the final standards for methane emissions in 2016.
“We are actually looking at what we’re doing next, which is moving forward with the information collection request … which is the best way for us to get at systematically these hundreds of thousands of sources,” McCarthy said.
The U.S.-Canada methane strategy is part of new coordination the countries announced they will be taking together to address climate change. The methane effort is part of a broader push to meet their obligations under last December’s United Nations climate change agreement in Paris. The countries pledged Thursday to remain committed to the agreement, and to sign the nonbinding document next month at U.N. headquarters in New York.
The Paris agreement is between 196 countries to make every effort to increase clean energy development while lowering emissions from fossil fuels. The goal of the Paris deal is to stop global warming from increasing by two degrees Celsius in the next few decades.
