EPA Issues Supplemental Notice on the Proposed Rulemaking to Reduce Methane from Oil and Gas Operations
- Proposal now includes the creation of a super-emitter response program
The U.S. Government is ramping up its efforts to reduce methane emissions, and since last year, it has set its sights on the U.S. oil and gas industry. While attending the COP 27 global climate conference this year, the U.S. President, Joe Biden, previewed a newly issued supplemental proposal by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) aimed at reducing methane emissions from both new and existing oil and gas operations and promote innovation in methane detection technologies like the ones offered by GHGSat. The supplemental notice updates, strengthens and expands upon the agency’s November 2021 proposal to reduce harmful emissions from sources by 87 percent below 2005 levels. The new proposal also includes a ground-breaking “Super-Emitter Response Program” that would require operators to respond to credible third-party reports of high-volume methane leaks. For the first time, the proposed rules provide a formal definition of a super-emitting event as emissions of 100 kg/hr or larger – precisely the current detection threshold of GHGSat’s existing and operational satellites.
The new super-emitter response program would use data from qualified third parties, allowing EPA to quickly identify and mitigate large-scale emissions from point sources. The EPA is proposing to treat a super-emitter emissions event as a separate and distinct source of emissions. To address this, the EPA is proposing two rationales for this program. One is to define a super-emitter as a designated facility (any equipment or control devices, or parts thereof, at a well site, centralized production facility, compressor station, or natural gas processing plant) that causes a super-emitter emission event. The other rationale is that the super-emitter response program constitutes work practice standards for certain sources and compliance assurance measures for other sources.
The Clean Air Act standards in the supplemental proposal accompany the new resources and programs in the Inflation Reduction Act, which incentivizes early implementation of methane reduction innovations and supports methane mitigation and monitoring. EPA is also encouraging the continued development of innovative technologies by proposing a clear and streamlined pathway for technology developers and others to seek approval for using advanced technologies to monitor for methane. Once the agency approves a technology and technique, owners and operators will be able to use it widely without the need for additional approval. The EPA projects that the proposed standards would reduce an estimated 36 million tons of methane emissions from 2023 to 2035. In 2021 alone, GHGSat detected 143 MTCO2e with the constellation of three satellites that existed at the time, of which 2.5 MTCO2e were mitigated. In May 2022, the company launched three additional satellites, increasing the existing constellation to six and with the plan to grow it to 10 by the end of 2023.
As the global leader in satellite monitoring of facility-level methane emissions, GHGSat is reaching out to operators to help understand how these draft rules could affect them and how GHGSat can work with them to identify their big leaks fast and ultimately comply with these rules.
