The Environmental Protection Agency is planning to release on Wednesday a proposal that would make it easier for oil and gas companies to comply with rules designed to limit the amount of methane released into the atmosphere.
The EPA proposal aims to ensure oil and gas companies have more time to assess and safely repair infrastructure, often in remote locations, according to a draft summary of the proposal.
The proposed changes, among other measures, would give drillers a year to do leak inspections instead of just six months, and 60 days to make repairs instead of 30, the document said.
Environmentalists are likely to oppose the plan, asserting the delayed inspections and repair schedules are likely to increase the amount of harmful gases released into the environment, and that the proposal opens the door to further rollbacks of climate regulations.
The proposal follows other moves by the EPA earlier this year to ease climate rules, including measures to roll back restrictions on carbon emissions from both power plants and automobiles.
Carbon and methane are considered to be two big drivers of climate change. Methane, however, is an even more potent greenhouse gas than carbon over the short term and frequently leaks from oil and gas wells, storage tanks and processing plants.
Former President Barack Obama’s administration set more stringent rules to address methane leaks. The rules were supposed to be a fundamental part of its effort to slow climate change, alongside the rules to lower carbon emissions in the power and transportation sectors.
The energy industry has long complained those rules amounted to regulatory overreach, claims adopted by the Trump administration, which includes among its ranks many former employees and allies of the energy industry.
The rollback is also an effort to fulfill the campaign promises of Mr. Trump, who has called global warming a hoax and blamed environmental rules for impeding economic growth.
The EPA plan is coming as the Interior Department also pushes its own proposal that would virtually eliminate its Obama-era rules aimed at cutting emissions of methane from drilling operations on federal lands.
EPA and Interior officials have discussed doing a joint announcement. But Interior is at a much different point in its rollback, near completing a proposal it made in February, according to a senior administration official.
News of the impending release of the methane proposal was reported on Monday in the New York Times.
“We welcome EPA’s efforts to get this right and the proposed changes could ensure that the rule is based on best engineering practices and cost-effective,” Howard Feldman, senior director of regulatory and scientific affairs at the oil-and-gas industry’s lobbying powerhouse, the American Petroleum Institute, said in a statement.
While many of the proposal’s details are incremental, and relatively technical, more wide-sweeping changes are still under consideration. The draft summary says the agency will issue a separate proposal later on its regulation of the oil-and-gas sector’s greenhouse gas emissions. Environmentalists are concerned that foreshadows an ultimate effort to gut the agency’s oversight over methane from oil and gas operations.
“The net effect would be a fig leaf of a rule that does almost nothing to reduce emissions in the long run,” said Matt Watson, associate vice president for the climate and energy program at the Environmental Defense Fund, a nonprofit environmental group that has been coordinating some of the country’s most extensive research on methane leaks.