Methane Kills

The EPA roll-back of the methane regulation is not only about the climate emergency. Air pollution kills.

In 2018, eroding air quality was linked to 10,000 additional deaths in the United States relative to the 2016 benchmark, the year in which small-particle pollution reached a two-decade low, an indictment on the new Environmental Protection Agency.

The EPA proposal to ignore methane emissions from oil and gas exploration and production, docket EPA-HQ-OAR-2017-0757-0002, must be denied and replaced with a ban on fracking.

EPA wants to eliminate methane emissions rules for new and existing sources and discontinue routine checks of transportation and storage facilities for methane leaks. Ignoring basic rules of behavior, EPA wants to greenlight reckless fracking.

EPA’s criminal behavior?

Breathing may be hazardous to your health. According to the EPA, hazardous air pollutants like dioxin, benzene, and toluene, are known to cause cancer or other serious health effects. Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are toxic gases known to cause cancer and damage the liver, kidneys, and central nervous system. Fine particulate matter less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter (PM2.5) are deadly compounds, invisible, and unstoppable without hazmat gear.

The EPA does not care about your future. Eliminating methane requirements in transmission and storage would result in an additional 370,000 tons of methane emissions, 10,000 tons of VOC emissions, and 300 tons of hazardous air pollutants per year.

How did we get in this mess?

In 2009, the EPA found that burning fossil fuels causes climate change, and greenhouse gases endanger both the public health and the public welfare of current and future generations. EPA amended the new source performance standards (NSPS) to reduce methane, a greenhouse gas, and VOC emissions across the oil and natural gas supply chain, the country’s largest emitter of methane.

In 2018, EPA disbanded the expert academic panel that advised the agency on its standards for fine-particle air pollution. EPA replaced the experts with consultants from the fossil fuel and tobacco industries.

In 2019, the current EPA proposes to roll-back the 2009 methane regulations, to “remove sources in the transmission and storage segment from the source category, rescind the NSPS (including both the VOCs and methane requirements) applicable to those sources, and rescind the methane requirements of the NSPS applicable to sources in the production and processing segments.”

Fracking ban

Natural gas was deceitfully sold to coal power plants as a “bridge fuel” to a post-carbon future. Methane leaks – invisible, odorless, and difficult to detect and measure – were overlooked and underestimated. Fracking wells with a high depletion rate have a short life, after a couple of years they are abandoned. Greedy investors get a tax break drilling oil wells, recuperating their investment in one year.

The fracking boom is full of leaks. The Permian Basin is sinking, investors are tired of throwing money in holes, and bankruptcies are increasing. Taxpayers will be left to clean up the mess.

No more fracking. The Permian Basin is buckling under the stress of fracking wells. The landscape looks like Swiss cheese with wide zones where land is sinking four feet.

An Environmental Defense Fund study found methane emissions across the country are at least 60 percent higher than estimated by the EPA. Methane emissions in the Permian go largely “unmeasured, unregulated, and unmitigated.”

The volume of methane vented or flared tripled in the past two years as oil and gas production grew significantly. Satellite data showed methane “hotspots” throughout the Permian coinciding with areas where venting and flaring are commonly used. Flaring is a source of heat, light, and noise pollution around the clock.

Rise up

Let’s plug abandoned wells in the Fayetteville shale. As of September 2018, when Southwestern Energy auctioned its shale assets, there were over 4,000 producing wells across over 915,000 acres. The Arkansas Oil & Gas commission allows owners to leave shale wells abandoned for years with methane emissions around the clock.

Ask your Congressional representatives to protect their constituents and help you prepare and send compelling comments to the EPA and ask them to plug the wells.

Dr. Luis Contreras