Trump Moves To Ease Biden’s Methane Crackdown On Oil And Gas Wells

The Trump administration wants to loosen Biden-era methane rules that small oil producers say make many older wells too costly to keep running.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is proposing to ease requirements on low-producing wells and scrap a program that relies on outside groups to flag large methane leaks, according to agency materials. The agency estimates its plan would save $45 billion.

The proposal is not final. The EPA will accept public comment for at least 45 days after the proposal is published in the Federal Register, including at a public hearing, according to an agency fact sheet.

President Donald Trump is expected to announce the plan at a campaign rally Tuesday in Lubbock, Texas, a White House official told the Washington Examiner.

The EPA is “co-proposing two options to create separate categories and standards for well sites,” according to the agency.

One would sort sites by “production level, marginal or non-marginal,” and the other by “resource type, conventional or unconventional.”

Producers of every size told the agency the 2024 rules were not workable and left no room for operators to make repairs, an EPA spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation on background.

About 783,000 of the nation’s more than 990,000 oil and gas wells, or 79 percent, count as marginal, the fact sheet says.

The National Stripper Well Association, which represents small producers, said in a Sept. 29 position statement it sent to the DCNF that the Biden-era rules, “as currently written, will shut down a majority of these stripper wells.”

“The costs associated with complying with these regulations will make the wells uneconomical to operate,” the association said.

Stripper wells produce about 8 percent of U.S. oil and about 7 percent of its natural gas, the association said. It added that their emissions account for “less than 0.2%” of the total U.S. emissions inventory, citing the Department of Energy and the EPA.

Complying with the current rules costs a stripper well $5,000 to $15,000 a year, while the wells net $5,000 to $10,000 a year, the association said in a document prepared for a Sept. 25 meeting it requested with the White House Office of Management and Budget. The cost figures come from states with similar rules, according to the document, which the association shared with the DCNF.

“Of the roughly one million active oil and natural gas wells in the United States, about 750,000 are low production, marginal wells,” the Independent Petroleum Association of America said in a statement to the DCNF.

“Our country should be doing everything we can to extend the productive life of these wells vs. prematurely shut them in,” the association added.

“The EPA for far too long has felt that it is acceptable to develop regulations that they know or should know will in effect force the closure of various types of businesses,” Daren Bakst, director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Energy and Environment, said in a statement to the DCNF.

“This is exactly what the Biden EPA did with its inflexible methane regulations and its impact on low-producing oil and gas wells,” Bakst added.

Bakst said methane emissions from oil and gas production “had been dropping significantly well before the Biden regulations were finalized, even as production was going up,” and that producers already have “a strong economic incentive to capture and sell methane.”

A spokesperson for Republican West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, who chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said in a statement to the DCNF that the senator backs the administration’s push to boost U.S. energy production by cutting costly rules.

David Doniger, a senior strategist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in an Oct. 7 written statement that “the Trump EPA is trying to give a free pass to the worst actors in the oil and gas industry,” The Hill reported.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin previewed the changes Oct. 7 at the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association’s annual meeting in Santa Fe, according to an agency press release.

“Americans must be able to afford to heat their homes in the winter and fill up their car and drive to work. They can’t do that when the people producing the energy are weighed down by unnecessary burdens,” Zeldin said in the release.

The relief for marginal wells answers “pleas from some smaller, independent oil producers that say the cost of complying with the requirements can overwhelm the economics of operating older wells,” Bloomberg News reported.

“These wells are a critical part of household economics,” Zeldin said in Santa Fe, according to the Albuquerque Journal. “Some owners use oil and gas to produce and power homes or run farm equipment, which helps offset everyday costs like groceries and gas.”

The EPA is also proposing to rescind the Super Emitter Program, which “certified third-party monitors for so-called ‘super emitter’ leak events,” according to the agency.

Those monitors could flag leaks with a rate of “100 kg/hr of methane or greater” found by remote sensing, according to the Federal Register.

The EPA said Oct. 7 that it does not think the program is “necessary to meet Clean Air Act requirements and is not effective.”

For the gas that comes out of oil wells, the proposal would bring back flaring at 95 percent efficiency, or another control device, as the standard, according to the EPA.

The EPA described the 2024 rule as “requiring all associated natural gas coming from oil wells to reach a sales line,” which it said “is not possible in all producing areas.”

The EPA estimates the proposal would unlock 210 million more barrels of oil and 1.41 trillion more cubic feet of natural gas.

Those figures cover 2027 to 2050, the spokesperson said.

The Biden-era EPA finalized the methane rules in December 2023, and they took effect in May 2024, according to the EPA and the Federal Register.

Zeldin’s EPA said in its Oct. 7 release that the rule imposed $18 billion in costs “without providing the environmental benefits promised.”

The spokesperson said the Biden administration underestimated the cost because it did not account for wells that would close or for higher costs passed on to consumers.

The $18 billion figure is the Biden administration’s own estimate of net compliance costs at a 3 percent discount rate, according to the final rule, which projected the rules would cut 58 million short tons of methane from 2024 to 2038.

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