The House voted Friday to repeal an Obama administration regulation aimed at reducing methane emissions from fracking.
Lawmakers voted 221-191 in favor of a resolution disapproving of the Obama-era rule from the Department of the Interior. Federal law allows Congress to override recently approved regulations under the Congressional Review Act.
The resolution rolls back an eleventh-hour regulation aimed at cutting methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, from oil and natural gas wells on federal lands as part of former President Obama’s climate change agenda. The Senate is expected to vote soon on a companion resolution repealing the methane venting and flaring regulations.
Environmental groups condemned the repeal as a license to pollute for drillers, while wasting valuable methane gas that should be paid for by companies operating on public lands instead of burnt off and just released into the air.
“Without this rule, companies will continue to waste $330 million each year in taxpayer-owned natural gas extracted from public lands owned by all Americans,” said Lauren Pagel, policy director for the group Earthworks. “In the process, oil and gas companies will also pollute our communities with carcinogens like benzene, and the climate with methane, a greenhouse gas 86 times more harmful than carbon dioxide.”
The oil industry argues that it has its own industry standards that account for reducing methane from production wells and other facilities. They also point out that the Environmental Protection Agency had issued separate, but very similar, regulations for controlling methane, making the Interior rule duplicative and unnecessarily burdensome.
Industry groups also argue that the EPA rules are also not required because industry has already taken measures to reduce methane, and has done so without the regulations.
