September 11, 2018

Today, Isaac Brown, the Executive Director of the Center for Methane Emissions Solutions released the following statement in response to the proposal of new rules on methane emissions from oil and gas sites by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

The Center for Methane Emissions Solutions is disappointed, though not surprised, that EPA has proposed a major revision to their rules regulating methane emissions from oil and gas sites. The rule was based largely on significant input from industry and used Colorado’s successful record of mitigating methane through its own Regulation 7, which helped create new high-paying, blue-collar jobs in the oil and gas industry as a template. EPA’s policy allows innovative leak detection and repair (LDAR) technologies to work with the oil and gas industry to identify and repair leaks in a quick, cost-effective manner. Instead, with its new proposal, EPA has introduced tremendous uncertainty into the market, as oil and gas companies will face uneven regulatory requirements across the country, which is bad for industry, the economy and the environment. While this news is a setback, CMES will continue to work with the Trump Administration to ensure that they understand the opportunity to capture methane leaks utilizing the range of effective solutions readily available on the market.

The Center for Methane Emissions Solutions is a coalition of methane mitigation companies in the United States. The methane mitigation industry is a robust and growing American industry, which works closely with the oil and gas industry to address methane waste in a cost-efficient manner.