The Trump administration is proposing to dramatically scale back a Biden-era rule that aimed to cut methane emissions from the oil and gas industry at drilling sites nationwide.Methane is a major contributor to climate change and is estimated to be 80 times more planet-warming than carbon dioxide in a twenty-year time frame.In 2023, the Biden administration finalized rules that were meant to rein in methane emissions from the oil and gas sector.President Trump made the announcement while campaigning in Lubbock, Texas, Tuesday, saying his administration's revision, under the Clean Air Act, would save the industry billions in production costs and spur more domestic drilling.
The proposal comes as Republicans face a backlash from voters over high gas prices heading into the midterms."Behind every barrel of oil and every cubic foot of natural gas produced in the U.S.are millions of workers, businesses, and the heartbeat of this nation's economy.
The Biden EPA destructively targeted all this," EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a press release.The oil and gas industry, which vigorously opposed the 2023 rules, said EPA's proposed rollback will address some of the challenges companies have faced in trying to comply with the regulations."We look forward to working with the Trump administration on a more workable approach that supports American energy production, provides greater regulatory certainty and advances continued emissions reductions," Dustin Meyer, vice president at the American Petroleum Institute, a trade organization for the U.S.oil and gas industry, said in a statement.But environmentalists say this may end up actually costing the industry more."Methane is natural gas, or natural gas is methane," says Jon Goldstein, associate vice president at the Environmental Defense Fund.
"And so if you're capturing more natural gas, you're not allowing it to leak out, you're not allowing it to be flared, you have more product that you can sell.And so that offsets a l...