US oil and gas producers are reducing wellhead methane emissions already and don’t need ill-conceived, overly prescriptive federal regulations, American Petroleum Institute officials said.
“Methane is what we sell,” API Regulatory and Scientific Affairs Director Howard J. Feldman told reporters at the trade association’s Washington, DC, headquarters. “We don’t need regulations to tell us to capture it. Producers have enough incentives already to curb emissions. In general, we don’t think it’s necessary for the federal government to do anything.”
API Group Upstream Operations Director Erik Milito, who also participated in the Dec. 4 briefing, added, “If you have blanket prescriptive requirements, it’s not going to create the necessary flexibility for producers to get at resources cost-effectively.”
They noted that the US Environmental Protection Agency’s latest greenhouse gas emissions inventory showed that the oil and gas industry’s methane emissions decreased 12% from 2011 to 2013, with the largest drop occurring from hydraulically fractured natural gas wells where emissions dropped plunged by 73%.
Feldman said a Dec. 3 Energy in Depth report included a graphic showing the extent to which methane emissions fell during that 2-year period in the eight biggest producing basins in the Lower 48 states.
“We’re still at not the infancy, but early childhood, of understanding what the industry’s emissions actually are,” he explained. “We would rather see efforts to identify and tackle the largest emissions sources first.”
Methane’s GHG share
Methane accounted for 9% of all GHG anthropogenic emissions in the US during 2012, the two API officials said. Cattle accounted for 25% of methane’s total that year, followed by natural gas systems (23%), landfills (18%), coal mining (10%), manure management (6%), petroleum systems (6%), and all other sources (9%).
API Standards Director David Miller, who joined Feldman and Milito at the briefing, said the trade association is launching a new pneumatic controllers standard to develop common terms and estimate emissions.
The devices could be a high emitting area, Feldman said. “API opposes a 111-D rulemaking for methane,” he continued. “We think EPA has other, better tools at its disposal.”
Milito said, “We’re just now seeing effects from the New Source Performance Standards for gas wells. We should see how well they work before starting to pile on more regulations. Steps need to be taken very deliberately. We need more information.”
Contact Nick Snow at [email protected].
Nick Snow
NICK SNOW covered oil and gas in Washington for more than 30 years. He worked in several capacities for The Oil Daily and was founding editor of Petroleum Finance Week before joining OGJ as its Washington correspondent in September 2005 and becoming its full-time Washington editor in October 2007. He retired from OGJ in January 2020.
