EPA Defends Deferral Of Methane Air Rules For Existing Oil & Gas Drilling

摘要

EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy is defending the agency's decision to defer regulation of the greenhouse gas (GHG) methane from existing oil and gas development and instead focus on imposing direct methane limits on new drilling, saying new sources have the greatest emissions and there is no legal deadline to regulate existing sources. The agency "felt it was entirely appropriate to start with what we knew we could deal with effectively, which are the new sources," McCarthy told a Jan. 16 reporters' roundtable at EPA headquarters in Washington, DC. EPA's recently announced oil and gas sector methane reduction plan says the agency will issue a proposed rule in the summer to impose first-time direct methane limits on new sources, but not on existing sources. The agency has said repeatedly that steps taken to reduce volatile organic compounds (VOC) from production have an indirect co-benefit of also reducing methane.