A small gas storage facility in Petal, Mississippi, is making a big impact when it comes to methane emissions. According to Inside Climate News, the station owned by Gulf South Pipeline and its parent company, Boardwalk Pipeline Partners, sends half a ton of methane into the atmosphere every hour. Recent data for the facility marks Petal Gas Storage as the top emitter of its kind, pumping out three-and-a-half times more methane emissions than any other gas storage station in the U.S.—and that’s just self-reported emissions. As with any aspect of the oil and gas industry, there’s little transparency and accountability to be had for companies like Boardwalk Pipeline Partners, which operates across many Gulf states, its more than 13,000 mile-long pipelines extending from Texas to Ohio.
There’s also little enforcement. As Inside Climate News notes, the Environmental Protection Agency tends to take a relatively mild approach to handling emissions issues from facilities like Petal and hasn’t really fought back, despite Boardwalk Pipeline Partners’ utter inability to follow industry recommendations released some 16 years ago. All of the blame truly lies with Boardwalk Pipeline Partners, as 99% of leaks leading to super-emitting events came from operational error, namely issues with reciprocating compressors that use pistons to compress gas. A component in those compressors known as isolation valves were more often than not found to be faulty, allowing for vast tons of methane to leak out.
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Inside Climate News stressed that the natural and geological means of gas storage at facilities like Petal Gas have nothing to do with the problems that plague it. When reached by Inside Climate News, Boardwalk Pipeline Partners pushed back on its high methane emissions, claiming they were “comparable with other companies listed on the same EPA report.” A spokesperson said the company was addressing the issue that led to high emissions—and it is true that total emissions plummeted by more than 100,000 metric tons from 2019 to 2020—but it’s anyone’s guess what Petal Gas Storage’s 2021 emissions will look like. Experts suggest that environmental, social, and governance (ESG) rules proposed by the SEC might force the hands of companies like Boardwalk Pipeline Partners. Such ESG rules would make major emissions and practices that put the planet at risk a liability for businesses.
A proposed EPA rule regulating methane emissions could further reduce the amount of greenhouse gases coming from the oil and gas sector. Released last November, hundreds of thousands of comments were made about the rule, which would “reduce methane and volatile organic compound emissions in the oil and natural gas sector.” The rule should be finalized by the end of this year but—like any proposed rule associated with the Clean Air Act—might be in jeopardy depending on how the Supreme Court rules on West Virginia v. EPA. The case, which could effectively gut the Clean Air Act and have far-reaching implications on the extent of authority and reach agencies like the EPA have, is just one of more than a dozen cases that have yet to be decided.