The Department of Interior doesn’t follow its own outdated policies in tracking natural gas emissions from production on federal lands, according to a new report.
The Department of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management is trying to track natural gas emissions from fossil fuel production with rules that are 30 years old, the Government Accountability Office said Thursday. And those rules and guidelines are applied haphazardly, the report said.
The government does not provide oil and gas operators specific instructions on how to estimate emissions from natural gas production. The bureau also doesn’t have rules governing issues such as venting, flaring, or the burning off of natural gas produced in oil production or for safety reasons.
“As a result of these limitations, Interior may not have a consistent accounting of natural gas emissions from onshore federal leases and does not have the information it needs to reasonably ensure it is minimizing waste on these leases,” the report stated.
The report was done as Interior tries to figure out the best ways to maximize the royalties it collects from oil and gas producers on federal lands. Interior asked the GAO to analyze how well the department accounts for natural gas emissions from venting and flaring and how the Bureau of Land Management’s field offices manage venting and flaring requests.
The result, it turns out, is they don’t manage them very well.
According to the report, field offices don’t consistently follow the bureau’s guidance for managing venting and flaring requests.
In fiscal 2014, the bureau received 1,281 venting and flaring requests. A random sample of 100 of those requests revealed about 90 percent of the requests didn’t have the proper documentation required by the bureau for the request, but officials still approved 70 percent of them.
For nearly half of the requests, oil and gas producers were allowed to vent and flare without paying any royalties with Bureau of Land Management approval, the report stated.
Field offices also used different criteria to approve venting and flaring requests, including some that assumed all venting-and-flaring requests were to be royalty-free, if approved.
The problem, according to the report, is that Interior historically only focused on collecting data on emissions from natural gas and oil produced for use, rather than emissions in general. Emissions have typically been allowed to go royalty-free, the report stated.
“Thus, the guidance Interior has provided to operators on how to report natural gas emissions has not ensured that these data are consistent and complete,” the report stated. “Without such data, Interior cannot ensure that operators are minimizing waste on federal oil and gas leases and collecting all royalties that are owed.”
While the Interior Department is considering a proposed update to venting and flaring requests that it hopes to finish before the end of the year, industry and government officers will operate in a confusing gray zone, according to the report.
“Without specific instructions from [the bureau] on how to develop estimates of natural gas emissions, it may also be difficult for [the bureau’s] production accountability staff to determine which method operators are using to estimate natural gas emissions and to verify their accuracy during periodic records reviews,” the report said.
