EPA Finalizes Rules to Cut Gas-Drilling Air Pollution
Charleston Gazette
18 April 2012
By Ken Ward Jr.
Read more: http://blogs.wvgazette.com/watchdog/
CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- The Obama administration on Wednesday
finalized new standards aimed at sharply reducing dangerous air
emissions from the nation's rapidly expanding natural gas drilling
and production industry.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials said the standards
are "flexible, affordable and achievable," but still delayed their
complete implementation in the face of industry lobbying and
fierce political criticism that the agency is costing jobs and
slowing energy production.
"The president has been clear that he wants to continue to expand
production of important domestic resources like natural gas, and
today's standard supports that goal while making sure these fuels
are produced without threatening the health of the American
people," said EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson.
The EPA action finalized new source performance standards and
hazardous air pollution standards to require gas producers to
better control volatile organic compounds and other toxic
emissions at key points in the drilling and distribution process.
New pollution controls will also begin to capture fugitive
emissions of natural gas, or methane, which itself is a powerful
greenhouse gas.
"These rules are a major American public health milestone," said
Jeremy Nichols, climate and energy program director at WildEarth
Guardians, a citizen group that sued to force EPA's action.
"Although we are disappointed that EPA may condone wasteful
drilling, on the whole, this is a win-win plan that protects
people and promotes responsible energy development."
Howard Feldman, a spokesman for the American Petroleum Institute,
said EPA made some improvements in the rule, notably allowing
companies until 2015 to fully comply, but said the industry group
needs more time to examine the final agency action.
"This is a large and complicated rulemaking for an industry so
critical to the economy, and we need to thoroughly review the
final rule to fully understand its impacts," Feldman said in a
prepared statement.
The EPA action comes amid a growing national debate over energy
policy, and as new technologies have fueled tremendous growth in
natural gas drilling, especially in shale-gas fields like the
Marcellus Shale areas in West Virginia and Pennsylvania.
EPA targeted its emissions rules on natural gas wells that are
drilled using hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," which uses
water, chemicals and sand injected underground at high pressures
to free trapped natural gas supplies.
Agency officials said they especially aimed to reduce emissions
that are vented during a three- to 10-day period called
"completion," when wells transition from drilling to gas
production. During this process, "flowback" that contains
fracturing fluids, water, and gases come to the surface at high
velocity and volume.
Eventually, operators will have to reduce these emissions through
so-called "green completion" in which gases are removed from the
flowback, rather than being vented into the atmosphere.
EPA agreed to give industry until 2015 to design, construct, and
purchase needed equipment for green completions, agency air
quality chief Gina McCarthy told reporters during a telephone
press conference. In the meantime, operators will generally be
required to burn off gases with pollution-reducing flares,
McCarthy said.
The final EPA action comes after a University of Colorado study,
issued last month, that found potentially harmful levels of air
pollution from natural gas operations. Over the last two years, a
separate series of scientific papers have examined questions about
the conventional wisdom that a switch to natural gas would really
reduce greenhouse emissions and help combat global warming.
In West Virginia, the natural gas drilling law passed during a
special session in December gives the state Department of
Environmental Protection until July 2013 to complete a special
study of air pollution from gas operations.
EPA said its new standards would reduce by nearly 95 percent the
volatile organic compounds emitted from more than 11,000 newly
fracked wells every year. EPA also said that natural gas emissions
reductions would save companies $11 million to $19 million a year
when the rules are fully implemented in 2015.
Also, EPA said that the rules would provide $440 million annually
in "climate co-benefits," including the value of avoided health
impacts, crop damage and damage to coastal properties from global
warming.
Reach Ken Ward Jr. at kw...@wvgazette.com or 304-348-1702.