The Bureau of Land Management is relaxing environmental rules on oil and gas allowing more release of methane, which is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
A notice slated to be published Friday in the Federal Register by the Bureau of Land Management said the agency “has concerns regarding the statutory authority, cost, complexity, feasibility, and other implications” of the 2016 rule, which is set to go fully into effect next month.
Enforcing rules is hard. It takes people who actually check to be sure companies are doing the right thing and … stuff. Much easier to just let oil companies vent excess methane into the atmosphere. Which they will.
Methane is a colorless and odorless gas that is up to 36 times as potent as carbon dioxide in terms of contributing to global warming. As development of oil and gas has increased through hydraulic drilling, or fracking, in shale formations, so have methane emissions.
Unlike the theoretical carbon capture of so-called “clean coal” plants, methane can easily be captured. In fact, methane is captured at every single natural gas well in the world. Methane is natural gas. But oil companies often find it easier to simply release (vent) or burn (flare) methane produced when drilling primarily for oil. And both oil and gas operations are subject to frequent leaks of methane which, because it is odorless and colorless, can become massive before anyone bothers to take action.
But the Trump administration has another very good reason for blocking the rules besides the “it was hard” argument. They also say that there’s little point enforcing them because the rules “may be rescinded or significantly revised in the near future.” Or not.
There’s not much point in changing a rule if it’s not being enforced.
The new rule will help keep oil and gas prices low—which is a decidedly mixed blessing. Low energy costs are helping hold down costs across the economy, but the market is currently heavily distorted by efforts among companies to put their competitors out of business by maximizing production. In this saturated market, producers are basically betting that they can either cut their costs below those of competitors or simply have the fiscal backing to outlast the rest of the field.
Changes like blocking the methane rules reward those companies willing to take the sloppiest approach, because it gives them some fraction of a cent advantage over those taking more care.
The same tactics are playing out in the coal market, where there is vastly more capacity than demand. The continued availability of gas at a competitive price is driving energy companies to drop coal plants as quickly as they can make the changeover. Which makes the supply/demand relationship in coal worse almost by the day.
Donald Trump has gone out of his way to kill the Clean Power Plan, to drop out of the Paris Agreement, to create a plan that forces power companies to burn coal, and to pass an executive order to allow coal companies to pour wastes into rivers. Despite all that, Trump’s favorite coalmine owner and squirrel whisperer, Robert Murray, says it’s still not enough.
Robert Murray, founder and CEO of Murray Energy, said Tuesday that the tax hike on coal mining firms that would result from the changes would cancel out progress that President Trump has made on reviving the coal industry, according to CNN.
What Murray is calling a “tax hike” is actually a 25 percent tax cut. But for Murray it’s still a disaster. That’s because coal is basically noncompetitive and can’t continue to survive in the US energy market without billions of dollars in direct support.
In theory, burning natural gas produces less than half the CO2 of burning coal, but with Trump also working to make using oil and gas as harmful as possible, there’s really only one solution—a more rapid move to a 100 percent renewable fuel supply that eliminates all fossil fuels.