Monthly Archives: May 2022

Lessons from New Mexico and Colorado’s leading methane rules

By Jon Goldstein / Published: May 5, 2022

Methane leaks from oil and gas sites represents a problem on many fronts. They create harmful air pollution, contribute to global warming and can even cause explosions. They also result in a lot of wasted gas.

Colorado and New Mexico — two of the nation’s leading energy producers — recently ramped up their methane pollution standards for the oil and gas industry.

Ensure standards apply to smaller, low-producing wells

The vast majority of the nation’s wells produce less than 15 barrels of oil a day and there are often calls for these sites to be exempted from environmental standards. This is a major problem because their footprint is huge and their climate impact adds up.

States should not weaken liability laws for CCS projects

By Scott Anderson / Published: May 3, 2022

Early this January, a geyser in West Texas started spewing tens of thousands of barrels of salty water a hundred feet into the air and coating the nearby land with salt deposits. It took about 10 days to discover the culprit was an old, dry oil well plugged in 1957 by Gulf Oil. By the next day, the Texas Railroad Commission had turned over the blowout and remediation to Chevron (who acquired Gulf Oil in the 1980s), who assumed full responsibility immediately and without question.

This is a normal cost of doing business in the oilfield in Texas and elsewhere — you break it, you pay for it.

Traditional regulatory and legal principles around liability are designed to hold operators accountable when they or those they are responsible for fail to live up to their responsibilities. Such rules encourage operators to do as good and thorough a job as technically feasible.

However, some states are weakening these rules for operators of carbon sequestration and storage projects. If this quiet trend continues, the integrity of these projects, their climate benefits and their public acceptance could be significantly threatened.

Posted in Carbon capture, Texas, Wyoming / Comments are closed

Dallas workshop showcases Texas-sized excitement for ZEV trucks

By Phillip Martin / Published: May 2, 2022

Last week, EDF and the North Central Texas Council of Governments hosted a daylong workshop on the state of zero-emission heavy-duty vehicles in Texas. Over 100 fleet owners, managers, industry experts and government officials came together to discuss the latest technology for hydrogen and electric trucks, the state of the Texas grid and go along for a ride-and-drive on some of the latest truck models on the road.

The transportation sector is the largest source of climate pollution in the U.S., and medium- and heavy-duty vehicles are responsible for more than half of the smog-forming pollution from the sector. Freight trucks and buses also consume more than 55 billion gallons of fuel annually at a significant cost for truckers and fleets.

EDF is committed to helping fleets of all sizes transition to cleaner ZEV truck models and in the process cut dangerous air pollution and protect the health of communities. That’s where this workshop comes in.

Posted in Electric Vehicles, Texas / Comments are closed