The White House whiffs on energy reform
By Tom Giovanetti
The Environmental Protection Agency just announced a plan designed to reduce the number regulations saddling the natural gas industry.
The intention is sound. Natural gas has become a critical component of the U.S. economy, powering our homes and offices and supporting millions of jobs. Easing regulations could help this industry reach new heights.
But the plan won’t succeed as it’ll keep many of the rules that are unnecessary and duplicative in place.
Natural gas production does pose some unique risks, chiefly from gas leaking out of the drilling and storage equipment. A key component of natural gas is methane, which is more potent than CO2 in terms of its potential contribution to global warming.
The natural gas industry has ample incentive to fix the problem on its own. When a rig leaks gas, it might as well be leaking money since methane itself is a sellable product. That’s why over the past two decades natural gas producers have invested more than $90 billion to develop new emissions-reducing technology.
These investments have worked. As natural gas production has expanded, methane emissions have dropped. From 1990 to 2015, domestic natural gas output spiked more than 55 percent, yet methane emissions from natural gas production fell over 16 percent.
Two years ago, federal regulators decided to establish some formal rules for methane emissions. Regulators hoped that the rules would empower public inspectors to ensure that gas rigs are minimizing leaks and protecting the environment.
These rules, known in bureaucratic gobbledygook as the “New Source Performance Standards OOOOa,” established plenty of reasonable controls: certification of vent systems, caps on emissions volumes, safety rules for storage vessels, and so on.
However, these standards also set up some unnecessary mandates without any environmental purpose. One particularly egregious example? Both state and federal regulators can conduct their own separate environmental reviews of drilling rigs.
Likewise, the standards require new emissions technologies to be approved at each site where they’re used. That would be extraordinarily expensive and time consuming.
The same goes for emissions reduction equipment. One evaluation ought to be enough.
These excess rules sap time and capital that could be put towards building new rigs and further expanding production.
Companies are spending money on compliance that could be going towards new jobs and higher salaries. The oil and natural gas industry accounts for nearly 8 percent of national GDP. Hampering its operations hurts the economy as a whole.
In September, the EPA announced that it would reform the methane rules, selling its efforts as a serious streamline.
But this package simply ignores the major sources of duplicative regulations. Regulators whiffed on a rare opportunity to provide serious economic relief to an industry that puts Americans to work and keeps their utility bills low.
That failure has environmental costs as well.
Natural gas is a cheaper replacement for coal and emits about half as much carbon. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, total annual emissions have fallen 14 percent since 2005 “mainly because more electricity has been generated from natural gas than from other fossil fuels.”
There’s still time for the EPA to make good on its promises as this “reform” package has not been finalized. Regulators ought to cut the red tape and allow the natural gas industry to power the American economy to new heights.
Tom Giovanetti is president of the Institute for Energy Research.
The viewpoints expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Independent.
How to submit an article, guest opinion piece, or letter to the editor to The Independent
Do you have something to say? Want your voice to be heard by thousands of readers? Send The Independent your letter to the editor or guest opinion piece. All submissions will be considered for publication by our editorial staff. If your letter or editorial is accepted, it will run on suindependent.com, and we’ll promote it through all of our social media channels. We may even decide to include it in our monthly print edition. Just follow our simple submission guidelines and make your voice heard:
—Submissions should be between 300 and 1,500 words.
—Submissions must be sent to editor@infowest.com as a .doc, .docx, .txt, or .rtf file.
—The subject line of the email containing your submission should read “Letter to the editor.”
—Attach your name to both the email and the document file (we don’t run anonymous letters).
—If you have a photo or image you’d like us to use and it’s in .jpg format, at least 1200 X 754 pixels large, and your intellectual property (you own the copyright), feel free to attach it as well, though we reserve the right to choose a different image.
—If you are on Twitter and would like a shout-out when your piece or letter is published, include that in your correspondence and we’ll give you a mention at the time of publication.
Articles related to “The White House whiffs on energy reform”
PacifiCorp and Rocky Mountain Power miss renewable energy opportunities
EnergySolutions seeks yet another exemption for depleted uranium
It would be nice if the author of this piece would include links to sites, articles, and such, to provide details that back up his assertions about these EPA regulations. Yes, readers could seek these on their own time, but why should they have to? Writers do readers a favor by providing sources. In this age of the Internet, that is very easy for them to do.