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.