Growing oil industry support for methane reduction rule could help it survive Trump's return

From the street they’re easy to miss. But in the self-proclaimed “American Dream City” — famous for its roller coasters and sport stadiums — residents know where to spot them. Oil and gas wells and compressor stations are tucked in between houses, schools, businesses and strip malls, woven into daily life.

And at times, methane, a potent greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change by trapping heat in the atmosphere, escapes from the equipment. Often, the methane comes out with other chemicals, including volatile organic compounds that contribute to smog formation, creating a cocktail of chemicals that are harmful to human health.

Earlier this year, a long-anticipated federal climate rule was finalized requiring oil and gas operators to dramatically reduce how much methane is released in many oil fields, including those in Texas.

The rule, written with input from industry, calls for operators to identify and fix equipment leaking methane and curb the practice of flaring — or burning off excess natural gas. Under the rule, operators will have to monitor emissions, wasteful flaring and leaks from most existing and new well sites.

States are now on a timeline to submit plans to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency detailing how they will implement the rule. Texas regulators are taking input from the public on the state plan until Dec. 31.

Some residents in Arlington, home to about 400 gas wells and 50 drilling sites, want the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to do more than the bare minimum outlined in the EPA’s guidelines and submit a plan before President-elect Donald Trump assumes office.

Trump reversed a methane reduction rule during his first term. Experts say rolling back the current rule would take years, and support from industry for the rule might help keep it in place.

At a public meeting last month in Arlington, Texas environmental regulators heard from more than a dozen residents about the proposed rule. One woman with severe asthma said “air quality is a life or death issue,” and asked state regulators to prioritize the health of citizens over economic interests. One man pointed out that oil and gas equipment sits close to schools and day care centers and called on regulators for speedy implementation of the rule to protect people from the health risks of urban fracking.

“The flares are not fun, smelling the rotten eggs is not fun,” Rogelio Meixueiro, who lives in Arlington and is a member of the nonprofit organization Sunrise Tarrant, told TCEQ regulators. “I can only trust that you’re going to do your job. I can only trust that you’re going to do everything possible to reduce methane emissions.”

Fracking in Arlington can be traced back two decades, when drillers discovered they could use horizontal drilling to access natural gas in the Barnett Shale formation underneath the city. Today in Tarrant County, which includes Arlington, more than 1 million people live within one half mile of a gas well, according to data from the local environmental group Liveable Arlington. The group’s organizers say that oil and gas air pollution disproportionately impacts many low-income communities of color.

Nearby cities have tried and failed to ban fracking. Roughly a decade ago, Denton, located about 45 miles north of Arlington, voted to prohibit fracking within city limits. The local ordinance was swiftly overturned by the state Legislature, which passed a law barring cities and towns across Texas from imposing such bans.

According to several studies, living near oil and gas wells is linked to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, impaired lung function, anxiety, depression, preterm birth and impaired fetal growth, primarily due to air pollution from the wells.

“(For years) we’ve been getting complaints from neighborhoods about smells, odors, headaches, sickness and what to do about it,” said Ranjana Bhandari, founder and executive director of Liveable Arlington. “Often we don’t have a remedy.”

What does the rule do?

Methane, a primary component of natural gas, accounts for about 16% of global emissions. Because methane lasts in the atmosphere for a few decades rather than a few centuries, reducing emissions would help moderate global temperatures more quickly.

Most of the methane emissions in the U.S. come from the energy sector — especially those in Texas, the nation’s largest oil and gas producing state.

Last year, Texas broke a record by producing 42% of the nation’s oil. Most of the state’s oil comes from the Permian Basin, a 75,000-square-mile region that stretches from eastern New Mexico and covers most of West Texas. The Permian Basin generates 1.4 million metric tons of methane each year — enough gas to meet the annual gas needs of nearly 2 million homes, according to the Environmental Defense Fund.

Currently, Texas doesn’t have a rule to capture escaping methane emissions from energy infrastructure. The state’s implementation of the EPA rule could change that.

The regulations are broken in two parts: one for new equipment constructed or modified after December 2022, and another for existing equipment. Most of Texas’ oil and gas equipment are existing methane sources.

A major component of the proposed state rule is tackling leaks from equipment failures, which are the largest source of methane pollution from oil and gas operations.

Operators will be tasked with inspecting their sites for leaks using handheld gas-imaging cameras or other technologies, which need to be approved by the EPA, to identify what equipment needs to be repaired or replaced. Gas wells will also need to be monitored for leaks until they are closed and plugged.

Oil and gas companies will be required to phase out routine flaring, a relatively common practice where excess natural gas produced during oil extraction is burned off at the wellhead. This is often done to dispose of gas that companies find uneconomical to capture or transport, or sometimes as a safety measure to relieve well pressure.

Flares can fail to burn off all the methane or can be unexpectedly extinguished, releasing raw methane into the atmosphere.

In Texas, state law says companies aren’t supposed to flare or vent gas without special permission from the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates the oil and gas industry. In 2022, the agency approved about 3,660 venting and flaring requests from oil and gas operators, according to agency data. Last year’s numbers are not available on the agency’s website.

Newly-constructed oil wells will be required to stop routine flaring altogether under the EPA rule. Existing sites can only flare if operators prove they cannot capture the gas for sale, reinjection or reuse.

According to a spokesperson at the American Petroleum Institute, the U.S. oil and gas industry is already doing its part to reduce emissions by improving its production processes, which the organization said resulted in methane emissions falling 37% between 2015 and 2022.

The EPA estimates implementation of the rule would eliminate 58 million tons of methane emissions nationally by 2038, as well as 16 million tons of smog-forming volatile organic compounds and nearly 590,000 tons of toxins like cancer-causing benzene.

Over that time, the standards will yield net health benefits worth up to $98 billion, after accounting for industry’s compliance costs, according to the EPA.

What will a new Trump administration mean?

Texas has already received $134 million from the federal government to permanently plug low-producing wells to help reduce methane emissions.

And while the EPA’s methane rule has been a cornerstone of President Joe Biden’s climate strategy to cut greenhouse gas emissions, Trump has said he will roll back federal regulations targeting climate change. Climate advocates were quick to warn that this could lead to the weakening or elimination of federal safeguards designed to limit harmful air pollution and greenhouse gases.

However, some experts believe Trump may face new pressures if he attempts to reverse the methane rule.

Arvind Ravikumar, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin who co-leads the Energy Emissions Modeling and Data Lab, said industry support for emissions reduction has grown since Trump’s last administration.

“Technologies have come a very long way. There’s a whole ecosystem of industry catering to addressing methane emissions, and the technologies from 2016 have significantly improved and are now being routinely deployed across the country by many oil and gas operators, both big and small,” he said.

Ravikumar added that international buyers are increasingly demanding cleaner, climate-friendly oil and gas production. The European Union approved a standard earlier this year that places limits on how much methane can be emitted in imported gas. Ravikumar said this would require all suppliers to the European Union, including the U.S., to comply with their new limits.

“So U.S. exporters are under pressure to make sure that their supplies are clean and have lower methane emissions,” he said.

Without the EPA’s standards, Ravikumar said, U.S. producers could struggle to compete in global markets.

Todd Staples, president of the Texas Oil & Gas Association, said state operators have focused for years on reducing emissions and have made considerable progress.

“We are hopeful President Trump and his administration will seek stakeholder input so that any policies implemented facilitate this progress and can survive political changes. In the meantime, a TXOGA workgroup has been actively involved in state implementation of the Biden administration’s methane rule to ensure common-sense, science-based outcomes for all operators,” he said.

Reversing the new methane rule could take years, as the process involves navigating regulatory hurdles and public review.

Others are concerned that Texas could adopt the new rule but fail to enforce it.

“Strong rules are great, but they need to be properly and adequately enforced to deliver their promises,” said Elizabeth Lieberknecht, a regulatory and legislative manager at the Environmental Defense Fund.

The TCEQ has said that the agency is experiencing staffing shortages due in part to salaries that aren’t high enough to attract and retain workers. At a September legislative meeting, an agency representative said the agency had nearly 400 vacant positions.

David Lyon, a senior research environmental scientist at UT-Austin, said it’s likely that states would opt not to enforce the rule without strong federal oversight to compel compliance.

“I could see states like Texas essentially not doing any enforcement,” Lyon said. “In an ideal world EPA would get Texas in trouble, but I think with Trump they might not do anything and allow Texas to not enforce.”

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This story was originally published by The Texas Tribune and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.