New York Times - Coral Davenport
The
weakening of Obama-era efforts to fight climate change amounts to a
gift to many oil companies. Researchers warn that the decision ignores
science.
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The rollback marks the last major Obama-era climate-change regulation to be weakened by the administration. Credit...Jessica Lutz for The New York Times
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WASHINGTON — The Trump administration formally weakened a major climate-change regulation on Thursday —
effectively freeing oil and gas companies from the need to detect and repair methane leaks — even as new research shows that far more of the potent greenhouse gas is seeping into the atmosphere than previously known.
The rollback of the last major Obama-era climate rule is a gift to
many
beleaguered oil and gas companies, which have seen profits collapse
from the Covid-19 pandemic. But it comes as scientists say that the need
to rein in methane leaks at fossil fuel wells nationwide has become far
more urgent, and new studies indicate that the scale of methane
pollution could be driving the planet toward a climate crisis faster
than expected.
Andrew Wheeler, the
head of the Environmental Protection Agency, announced at an event in
Pittsburgh on Thursday that he had completed the legal process of
lifting the methane regulation. He was speaking in a city at the heart
of the nation’s natural-gas boom, and in a state that will be critical
to winning this fall’s presidential election.
“E.P.A.
has been working hard to fulfill President Trump’s promise to cut
burdensome and ineffective regulations for our domestic energy
industry,” he said. “Regulatory burdens put into place by the
Obama-Biden administration fell heavily on small and medium-sized energy
businesses.”
The
E.P.A. estimates that the rule changes will yield economic benefits of
roughly $100 million a year through 2030, while leading to the release
of about 850,000 tons of planet-warming methane into the atmosphere over
the same period.
Mr. Wheeler has
justified the move by citing E.P.A. data showing that leaks from
domestic oil and gas wells have remained steady over the past decade,
even as oil and gas production boomed.
However,
numerous recent studies show the opposite: that methane emissions from
drilling sites in the United States are far more extensive than the
E.P.A.’s official numbers. Overall, methane levels are in fact climbing
steadily nationwide, according to the research, and have reached record
highs globally in part because of leaks from fossil fuel production.
“Over
the past few years there has been an explosion of new research on this,
and the literature has coalesced — 80 percent of papers show that
methane from oil and gas leaks is two to three times higher than the
E.P.A.’s estimates,” said Robert Howarth, an earth systems scientist at
Cornell University, who last year published a study estimating that
North American gas production was responsible for about a third of the global increase in methane emissions over the past decade.
“It’s
crazy to roll back this rule,” said Dr. Howarth. “Twenty-five percent
of the human-caused warming over the past 20 years is due to methane.
Methane is going up. We need it to go down.”
Scientists
say that the new data on soaring levels of methane means that, even if
the world’s governments were somehow able to meet the targets of the
2015 Paris climate change agreement — in which every nation agreed to
lower their carbon dioxide pollution — those achievements could be wiped
out by the heat-trapping power of all the previously uncounted methane
in the atmosphere.
Already,
the effectiveness of the Paris pact is imperiled, since Mr. Trump has
withdrawn the United States from it. But environmentalists are hopeful
that it could be restored if Joseph R. Biden Jr. wins the presidential
election this fall and the United States rejoins the agreement.
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E.P.A. administrator Andrew Wheeler has argued that his agency’s data shows leaks haven’t increased. That claim is contradicted by numerous scientific studies. Credit...Pool photo by Al Drago
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“The
Paris Agreement was not taking into account the new increase in
concentrations of methane,” said Peter Raymond, an ecologist at Yale who
co-authored a study published in July concluding that
global levels of methane have surged to record heights.
“Because
methane is so powerful, this rise could offset a lot of the goals in
the Paris agreement,” he said. That could intensify many of the already
baked-in near-term effects of a warming planet, such as extended
droughts, deadly heat waves, stronger hurricanes and more devastating
coastal flooding.
Methane comes from
various sources in addition to energy production, including animal
digestive tracts and landfills, and it lingers in the atmosphere for
less time than carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, which comes from
burning fossil fuels. But methane has 80 times the heat-trapping power
in its first 20 years in the atmosphere.
In
recent years, the United States has cemented its place as one of the
world’s biggest producers of oil and natural gas, a result of the
fracking boom. However, a shortage of pipelines, combined with low
prices for natural gas caused by the abundant supply, has meant there’s
less of a financial incentive to prevent leaks at drill sites.
During
his administration, President Barack Obama sought to use executive
power to fight climate change with a suite of E.P.A. regulations that
targeted three major sources of planet-warming pollution: carbon dioxide
emissions from cars and from coal-burning power plants, and methane
leaks from wells.
At the time, the methane rule was seen as slightly
less consequential than the other two rules, addressing cars and coal
plants, in part because data showed significantly lower levels of
methane in the atmosphere than of carbon dioxide.
President Trump last year
rolled back the rule on coal-plant pollution, and this
spring he significantly weakened the rule on auto pollution.
But
now, as Mr. Trump rounds the final turn of his unraveling of Mr.
Obama’s climate legacy, scientists say that the importance of reining in
methane has become far greater as the data has piled up indicating the
scale of the leaks.
According to the E.P.A.’s
annual inventory of United States greenhouse emissions,
oil and gas wells emitted about 7 million tons of the heat-trapping gas
annually between 2014 and 2018. The more recent studies, however, show
the real number could be up to twice that.
A
scientific study published last month
found that the United States fossil fuel industry in 2017 emitted about
13 million tons of methane, the heat-trapping equivalent of a year’s
worth of carbon dioxide pollution from all the nation’s coal-fired power
plants.
A
2018 study in the journal Science also concluded that, in 2015, the United States oil and gas industry was leaking about 13 million tons of methane annually.
“In
many oil and gas fields, we’re finding emissions to be considerably
higher than what E.P.A. says they are,” said Rob Jackson, an earth
scientist at Stanford University who co-authored the July study. Methane
emissions, he said, are “not stabilizing. They’re certainly not going
down.”
Several
scientists said that the key reason for the discrepancy between their
studies and the E.P.A.’s numbers was the thoroughness of the methods
used to detect methane. To compile its annual inventory of methane
emissions, the E.P.A. relies on a mix of self-reported data from
companies themselves, and some on-site testing of drilling wells, pipes
and other equipment.
The scientists
said such testing is not comprehensive. In recent years, academic
scientists have started using new technologies and techniques to more
completely account for methane leaks from drilling sites and pipelines,
such as airplanes and vehicles fitted with atmospheric monitors and
infrared cameras, as well as satellites.
“There
are blind spots in the E.P.A.’s testing — they were missing all these
sources of the leaks,” said Ramón Alvarez, a lead author of the 2018
paper and an atmospheric chemist at the Environmental Defense Fund, an
advocacy group.
An E.P.A. spokesman,
James Hewitt, contested that assertion. “E.P.A.’s final methane rule is
based on the most accurate and comprehensive accounting of our nation’s
greenhouse gas emissions profile, which is performed by agency
scientists based on data from a variety of sources, including the
agency’s greenhouse gas inventory, the greenhouse gas reporting program,
new studies, and comments received on the proposal. We stand by our
numbers and analysis,” he said.
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A pipeline operator in Damascus, Ark., with a methane leak detector. Credit...Andrea Morales for The New York Times
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The oil and gas industry itself is divided on the rollback of the methane regulations.
Major
companies like Exxon, Shell and BP had urged the Trump administration
to keep the controls in place.
Those companies have invested millions of
dollars to promote natural gas as a cleaner option than coal in the
nation’s power plants, because natural gas produces about half as much
carbon dioxide when burned. They fear that unrestricted leaks of methane
could undermine that marketing message and hurt demand.
But
smaller, independent oil companies supported the rule as a measure of
relief when many are struggling to stay afloat. Those companies also
point out that existing E.P.A. regulations still require them to
regulate a separate but related category of gases, volatile organic
compounds, and that those curbs have the side benefit of averting some
methane emissions.
“This
doesn’t shift the regulatory burden — we’re still going to have the
same requirements” for any new wells that are drilled in the future,
said Lee Fuller, a vice president at the Independent Petroleum Producers
of America, which represents smaller oil and gas companies.
But
lifting the methane rule does avert a far more stringent future
obligation on small oil and gas companies: If the rule had stayed in
place, it eventually could have required companies to repair and
retrofit thousands of older existing wells — a far costlier undertaking.
It
is that requirement that terrifies small oil and gas drillers, said Mr.
Fuller. “To compel it to apply to existing wells is too expensive. It
would drive them out of business.”
That may be true, said some scientists. But they also say that many of those small, older wells could be
likely sources of the vast quantities of harmful emissions.
“This
rule helps smaller oil and gas companies, the ones operating on the
edge of financial viability,” said Dr. Jackson, the Stanford scientist.
“But it’s also saying that science doesn’t matter. It’s prioritizing
very short-term economic gain over longer-term economic health and human
health.”
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