The Obama administration took steps Friday to limit natural gas “flaring” on federal and tribal lands as part of a long-anticipated move by the Interior Department to cut greenhouse gases under the president’s climate change agenda.
The proposed rule is aimed at venting, flaring and leaking from natural gas fracking wells. The agency says the regulations will help curb the waste of natural gas while reducing “harmful methane emissions and provide a fair return on public resources for federal taxpayers, tribes and states.”
“I think most people would agree that we should be using our nation’s natural gas to power our economy — not wasting it by venting and flaring it into the atmosphere,” said Interior Secretary Sally Jewell. “We need to modernize decades-old standards to reflect existing technologies so that we can cut down on harmful methane emissions and use this captured natural gas to generate power and provide a return to taxpayers, tribes and states for this public resource.”
Methane is a short-lived but potent greenhouse gas, and many scientists blame greenhouse gases for driving manmade climate change.
But the energy industry sees the regulations as unnecessary and potentially burdensome.
“This is the latest in the string of bad policies released by this administration showing a lack of knowledge of how the oil and gas industry truly works. Imposing these new regulations will make it more expensive and harder for independent producers to operate, reducing America’s total energy production and preventing additional receipts from going back to the United States Treasury,” said Dan Naatz, Independent Petroleum Association of America senior vice president for government affairs.
Naatz argued that it is already in the industry’s best interest to stop venting and flaring as part of a sound business strategy that contributes to a bigger bottom line, since they are a waste of natural gas. But adding unnecessary regulations likely will limit the benefits of natural gas for the economy and the environment, he said.
“We are concerned that these new rules could create a regulatory regime that prevents the extension of the financial and important environmental benefits generated by American oil and natural gas production,” said Naatz, whose organization represents many of the independent oil and gas companies that drove the oil and gas boom of the last decade.
