By Jon Goldstein and Peter Zalzal
The legal fight to defend the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) recent efforts to prevent oil and gas companies from wasting methane on public and tribal owned land continued yesterday.
EDF and a coalition of local, regional, tribal and national allies filed a brief opposing efforts by industry organizations and a handful states to block BLM’s protections before they even come into effect. Read More
Last month the Bureau of Land Management took a much needed step to prevent the oil and gas industry from needlessly wasting American energy resources.
For oil and gas companies operating on public and tribal lands, the new standards will reduce the amount of methane that operators can leak, vent or burn into the atmosphere. These methane emissions result in massive amount of energy waste that translates to lost revenues for federal taxpayers and tribes. One recent analysis suggests that without these standards, taxpayers could lose out on more than $800 million in royalty revenue over the next decade. Read More
Today the Bureau of Land Management finalized new rules that limit the amount of methane oil and gas companies can leak, vent, or flare on the 245 million acres of taxpayer-owned and tribal lands. This is a huge, $330 million dollar problem according to a recent study from ICF international. While an analysis from the Western Values Project estimates taxpayers could lose out on almost $800 million over the next decade – unless the BLM acts to reduce wasteful venting and flaring practices.
Reeling in waste of resources that belong to the nation’s tribes and taxpayers is an effort that folks from across the political spectrum can get behind. Read More
By Daniel Roda-Stuart, Fellow
With oil and natural gas production, it’s not only the industry that benefits monetarily. Mineral rights holders (the people who actually own the oil and gas deep below the earth’s surface) benefit too. Depending on where you look in the United States, who owns these mineral rights varies. In many places those minerals are owned by individuals and in other situations it’s the federal or state government.
In the Western U.S., it can often be Native American tribes that own the rights to these resources. And the revenue from the production of these tribal resources can be invaluable for funding education, health care, and other programs. So, what happens when faulty equipment and poor practices allow valuable natural gas to escape to the atmosphere before making it to the sales line? It can result in millions of dollars of lost royalty revenue for Native American tribes.
A recent EDF analysis focuses on the value of this wasted gas and the financial impacts to the Northern Ute tribe in the Uintah Basin of Northeastern Utah. Read More
Look up in New Mexico and on most days you’ll see the unmistakable blue skies that make the Southwest so unique.
But there’s also something hovering over the Four Corners that a naked eye can’t detect: A 2,500-square mile cloud of methane, the highest concentration of the heat-trapping pollution anywhere in the United States. The Delaware-sized hot-spot was first reported in a study two years ago.
At the time, researchers were confident the cloud was associated with fossil fuels, but unsure of the precise sources. Was it occurring naturally from the region’s coal beds or coming from a leaky oil and gas industry?
It’s unfortunate that a partisan group of Congressional representatives recently tried to turn back the clock on new rules from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management that can protect taxpayers and local communities from the needless waste of our natural gas resources and methane pollution.
It was a disappointing move, considering that a bipartisan group of elected officials came together to defend the BLM’s natural gas waste rule during a budget fight on the House floor in July.
Some members of Congress are really good at expressing their opinions. However, in this case the facts clearly show that efforts to cut waste and protect our air are necessary and warranted.
Fact: Despite some creative data cherry-picking to spin a different story, the data is clear that methane emissions from oil and gas operations have grown significantly in the past decade (up 8% since 2005). Read More