White House Climate Push Goes Beyond Coal, With New Rules Targeting Oil and Gas Industry

The White House unveiled plans Wednesday to cut leaks of methane from oil-and-gas production and transport, signaling an expansion of President Obama's fight against climate change that until now has focused most heavily on carbon dioxide pollution from coal-fired power plants. The strategy, which will include binding new regulations, aims to curb emissions of the potent greenhouse gas from the oil and gas sector by 40 to 45 percent of 2012 levels by 2025. That's expected to save 180 billion cubic feet of natural gas, or enough to power 2 million homes for a year, the White House said. While the administration has gone heavily after coal and transportation fuels in its effort to fight climate change, the rules announced today mark one of the only attempts to regulate the booming natural-gas industry, which is at an all-time high and has pushed down global oil prices. It's an effort certain to face political and lobbying pushback from the petroleum industry and its Capitol Hill allies. The methane action will be driven through several agencies, headlined by EPA standards on new and modified natural-gas wells to reduce emissions of methane and volatile organic compounds. Those rules will be proposed this summer and finalized in 2016. Those standards will not affect existing gas wells, as senior White House climate policy aide Dan Utech said the administration was trying to move a "standard-setting process" that focused on new sources where emissions were rising the most. EPA will work with the industry on a voluntary basis on existing sources, although Utech said the administration did make clear "that we need to get reductions from existing sources." The Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management will also update its decades-old standards on natural-gas flaring, or the burning of excess natural gas. The Energy Department will work on technology to reduce methane loss during gas drilling and to measure emissions from the oil and gas sector for the national Greenhouse Gas Inventory...more