Expansion of plans to regulate methane from oil and gas facilities should be viewed in the context of other initiatives by the administration of Barack Obama.
Cuddling with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, in Washington, DC, the president on Mar. 10 said the Environmental Protection Agency will write rules governing emissions from existing oil and gas equipment. Until now, EPA's proposals have targeted new facilities.
Trudeau, leader of the Liberal Party, promised similar measures.
The crackdown comes despite an 11% drop in methane emissions from US oil and gas work since 2005.
But the real target isn't methane. It's oil and gas work.
Unnecessary and excessive methane regulation will increase costs of operators struggling with depressed oil and gas prices. This fits a pattern.
Before the COP21 climate summit in Paris late last year, Obama ceremoniously proposed a $10/bbl "fee" on oil.
According to the president's budget proposal for fiscal 2017, the levy would raise $107 billion during the next 5 years and $319 billion through 2026-from an industry in grave distress.
Combined with the elimination proposed every year of oil and gas tax preferences, the fee would extract $126 billion from the industry over 5 years and $354 billion over 10 years.
Neither the fee nor many, if any, of the tax-preference changes will be implemented. But the measures are important for what they say about intent: to hobble the oil and gas industry. The same motivation is at work in, for example, the Bureau of Land Management's unwarranted rule on hydraulic fracturing of wells on federal land.
Last year, when EPA published final rules on emissions of greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, the president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, which developed the initiative's legal strategy, warned the gas industry not to expect to benefit from diminished use of coal. The aim, she said, was to lower US use of all fossil fuels (OGJ, Aug. 10, 2015, p. 16).
Obama is only too eager to oblige.
(From the subscription area of www.ogj.com, posted on Mar. 11, 2016; author's e-mail: [email protected])
About the Author
Bob Tippee
Editor
Bob Tippee has been chief editor of Oil & Gas Journal since January 1999 and a member of the Journal staff since October 1977. Before joining the magazine, he worked as a reporter at the Tulsa World and served for four years as an officer in the US Air Force. A native of St. Louis, he holds a degree in journalism from the University of Tulsa.