- The White House just announced a goal of reducing methane emissions from oil and gas operations 40 to 45 percent below 2012 levels by 2025.
- The plan involves both voluntary action by industry plus future regulations by the Environmental Protection Agency on new oil and gas wells.
- But environmentalists said the administration needs tighter regulations on existing oil and gas equipment, the source of roughly 90 percent of methane leaks.
- More broadly, the US can't meet its climate goals — cutting greenhouse-gas emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 — without curtailing methane emissions, which are expected to rise with the fracking boom.
Obama needs to cut methane for his climate plan to work
Over the last six years, the Obama administration has been trying to address global warming with a flurry of rules aimed at reducing US carbon-dioxide emissions. First there were stricter fuel-economy standards for cars and trucks. More recently, the EPA proposed sweeping carbon regulations for coal-fired power plants (known as the "Clean Power Plan").
The overarching goal was to cut US greenhouse-gas emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. That, the administration believed, would help advance global climate talks.
But all of Obama's moves so far have been insufficient to get to that 17 percent cut by 2020. As recent analyses from the Rhodium Group and the Clean Air Task Force have argued, the US also needs to reduce methane emissions dramatically to get there:
Carbon-dioxide is the biggest greenhouse gas responsible for global warming. But it's not the only one. There's also methane. The US burns a lot of methane — known as "natural gas" — for energy. But when methane leaks out of oil and gas wells or pipelines and into the atmosphere, it acts as a potent greenhouse gas. (The White House says it's 25 times as effective at trapping heat as carbon dioxide. Other scientists say 34 times.)
In 2012, the EPA estimated that methane accounted for roughly 8.7 percent of US greenhouse-gas emissions (though this may be an underestimate). But experts have warned that methane leaks could be poised to grow in the coming years.
Thanks to the fracking boom, US energy companies have been extracting more and more natural gas from shale formations. On one level, that's good news for climate change: utilities are now burning more natural gas for electricity instead of coal, which means lower carbon-dioxide emissions from power plants.
The problem is that all this new drilling increases the risk of methane leaking into the air — and those leaks are undermining the climate benefits of the gas boom.
How to stop methane leaks from oil and gas
In theory, it should be doable to plug these methane emissions, which can come from leaky pipelines or faulty drilling operations. Many companies already use infrared cameras to detect leaks and plug them. And they have financial incentives to do so — after all, these companies would rather capture that methane and sell it for money than just have it float off into the air.
Still, the White House wants to make sure these leaks really get plugged. So, on Wednesday, it announced a goal of cutting methane emissions from oil and gas operations 45 percent below 2012 levels by 2025.
This would be done through a combination of guidelines for voluntary actions by the industry and a hodgepodge of new regulations crafted by the EPA and other agencies. Some rules would focus on methane leaks from new oil and gas wells. Others would focus on pipelines used to transport the natural gas. The Interior Department is updating standards for drilling on public lands.
The White House noted that the oil and gas industry has already managed to cut methane emissions 16 percent since 1990 through voluntary measures. "Nevertheless," it added, "emissions from the oil and gas sector are projected to rise more than 25 percent by 2025 without additional steps to lower them."
Some environmental groups said the White House's plan didn't go far enough. For example, the EPA is currently only working on rules to reduce emissions at new oil and gas wells — and only much later will they work on rules for existing wells, which are by far the biggest source of emissions.
"While setting methane standards for the first time is an important step, failing to immediately regulate existing oil and gas equipment nationwide misses 90% of the methane pollution from the industry," Conrad Schneider of the Clean Air Task Force said in a statement.
Jayni Hein, policy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law, agreed: "EPA's steps announced today would trim the sector's methane releases by about a third. We can and should go farther by regulating existing oil and natural gas sources."
By contrast, many oil and gas companies don't want new regulations at all — they argue that the industry is already curbing methane leaks as is. "Emissions will continue to fall as operators innovate and find new ways to capture and deliver more methane to consumers," said Jack Gerard, head of the American Petroleum Institute, in a statement. "Existing EPA and state regulations are working. Another layer of burdensome requirements could actually slow down industry progress to reduce methane emissions."
There's also methane from cow burps and landfills
Meanwhile, it's worth noting that there are other sources of methane besides oil and gas. In 2012, according to the EPA, roughly 30 percent of methane in the United States came from natural-gas and petroleum operations (though, again, that may be an undercount).
-- By contrast, 36 percent of US.methane emissions came from agriculture. The beef and dairy industry is a major contributor here: when cows belch, they produce methane (known as "enteric fermentation"). Other sources include decomposing cow manure, as well as methane from rice cultivation.
-- Another 18 percent came from landfills. When food and other trash decays in a landfill, the organisms that feed on that trash emit methane into the atmosphere.
The Obama administration has been working on steps to cut methane in these areas, too. Back in March, the EPA announced it would come up with standards to reduce methane from all future landfills. It will then solicit public comments on whether to regulate landfills that have already been built.
As for cow burps, however, the administration is relying on purely voluntary measures for now. In June 2014, the EPA unveiled a "partnership" with the dairy industry to speed up the adoption of methane digesters that turn cow dung into energy. The hope is to reduce methane emissions from the dairy sector 25 percent by 2020.
Further reading: Obama has promised to cut US emissions 17% by 2020. Is that still possible?