Is the Biden administration’s priority on reducing methane emissions from oil and gas operations a wise move or a distraction from the more important goal of controlling carbon dioxide emissions? It’s not an easy question, despite a lot of buzz around methane reductions, claiming that action harvests (here’s the cliché) “low-hanging fruit.”
Touting the program, EPA claims that methane is “a climate ‘super pollutant’ that is more potent than carbon dioxide and responsible for approximately one third of the warming from greenhouse gases occurring today. The oil and natural gas sector is the largest industrial source of methane emissions in the United States. Quick reduction of these methane emissions is one of the most important and cost-effective actions the United States can take in the short term to slow the rate of rapidly rising global temperatures.”
The Environmental Protection Agency Jan. 12 announced a sliding scale of emission fees for methane emissions, under provisions of the administration’s flagship Inflation Reduction Act climate legislation. The purpose of the “waste emissions charge” is to give industry sources of the chemical, the main component of natural gas, incentives to reduce “fugitive” emissions from wells, pipelines, and storage facilities. When burned in natural gas fueled power plants, a result is CO2 emissions considerably lower than emissions from coal CO2 emissions for the same heat input.
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