Mariane Angela
News Reporter
A federal judge temporarily halted the enforcement of a Biden-Harris administration rule in five states on Thursday designed to reduce methane emissions and minimize natural gas waste on federal lands.
U.S. District Court Judge Daniel Traynor issued a preliminary injunction that temporarily blocks the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) from enforcing a new rule that was implemented in April in North Dakota, Montana, Texas, Wyoming and Utah, according to The Hill. These states argued that the federal rule, which mandates oil and gas companies to implement waste reduction plans and leak detection programs on public lands, constitutes an overreach of federal authority, infringing upon state rights.
The contested rule requires operators to curtail the venting, flaring and leaking of natural gas during oil extraction processes, the outlet reported. The Biden-Harris administration has made it part of its climate agenda to reduce certain emissions, like methane, the primary component of natural gas.
Traynor stated in his decision that the states are likely to prevail because “on the merits of their claim, the 2024 Rule is arbitrary and capricious” and pointed out that various aspects of the rule are “inadequately explained” and “contradictory,” the North Dakota Monitor reported. This regulation impacts federal and tribal territories, and the Fort Berthold Reservation hosts the majority of oil and gas extraction on tribal lands in North Dakota.
BLM, under the Department of the Interior, argued that venting and flaring natural gas squanders public and Native American resources, cutting significant royalty revenues for taxpayers, tribes, and states, while exacerbating climate change, the North Dakota Monitor stated. However, Judge Traynor contends that the BLM lacks the authority for air quality control, a power reserved for the Environmental Protection Agency and the states by the Clean Air Act.
North Dakota challenged the rule, claiming it infringed on state sovereignty and would diminish state revenue from oil and gas production, while the BLM estimated the rule could generate over $50 million in tax revenue, the North Dakota Monitor reported. Traynor further questioned the economic benefit of the rule and said that it “offers no rationale why flaring is more economically productive than venting.” (RELATED: Biden Admin Moves To Ban New Oil Leases On 1.6 Million Acres Of Land)
The North Dakota Petroleum Council celebrated the decision as a victory for the oil industry, citing that the rule would have imposed stringent flaring limits and costly compliance requirements, particularly burdening smaller operators, the North Dakota Monitor stated. In response, Republican North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum lauded the court’s temporary injunction, accusing the Biden administration of overreaching on federal land oil and gas production regulations.
The White House, Burgum and the North Dakota Petroleum Council did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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Leaking methane beyond being wasteful, is not a problem. The article didn’t mention the Global Warming Potential numbers that are present in all the IPCC reports, but that’s what it is all about.
In that regard, Climate science never says and the media and policy makers never ask how much global temperature rise methane is on track to produce. The reason for that is it’s so small as to be unmeasurable.
I totally agree, just think how many products could be made from all that wasted fuel.
Pretty sure they wouldn’t flare it if they could find an economic way of collecting it.
Sorta right, but sometimes the “cheapest” way isn’t for the common good…that’s why governments are needed…like to pay for sewers and sewage processing facilities instead of everyone dumping their chamber pot contents onto the streets.
In the case of flared natural gas associated with oil production, the gas might be flared to make oil revenue, and is not in itself economic to sell for the cost to recover it….but if there is a “law” that you can’t produce the oil without pipelining the gas to a gas plant….suddenly it becomes “economic” for some producers to build the pipeline, thereby increasing the amount of gas conserved.
It’s what laws and governments are valid for….for example, make speeding illegal for the common good by passing a “law”…maybe figure out how to collect some revenue to pay for the policing….no need to compensate people for longer driving time it now takes them to get to work unless you are a politician in search of votes….
If you make money building a pipeline, then the company will do it. If the overall effect of building the pipeline is a net loss, then this is to the common detriment, not the common good. Similar to the broken window fallacy in economics.
I can guarantee the producers think about that, too. But currently it’s not economic to do so.
It’s about GOVERNMENT REVENUE. Governments looking for a plausible way to collect non-compliance penalties from industries that they feel can pass the costs on to consumers, maybe create a few white collar inspection and paperwork shuffling jobs along the way…. While looking like environmental stewards of course.
This isn’t clean, filtered gas that’s being burned off. I suspect the cost to clean it up isn’t economically beneficial.
I know some municipalities have placed perforated pipes throughout the debris of their landfills. They then collect methane gas, clean it, compress it, and sell it to the local gas company for a tidy profit.
It is highly unprofitable. The gas is at ambient pressure. Since it is biotic gas, it is around 50% CO2. So you have to remove the CO2 and the H2S. Since the gathering compressors run at a slight vacuum, you also have to sponge any O2 present to avoid corrosion. Then you have to boost it up to pipeline pressure. It is purely a taxpayer milking scheme and no where near pofitable.
It’s probably largely to eliminate its hazard.
I have not seen anywhere proof that a) is a dangerous gas b) that it is worse than CO2. Back in 2011 I wrote this https://cementafriend.wordpress.com/2011/10/. If one looks at the Radiation Transmitted by the atmosphere (from NASA and can be found on the net) Methane only absorbes radiation at 8 micron wavelength which is nothing from the Earth’s surface and nothing from the sun. I suggest the supposed “worse than CO2” is all made up as in my 2011 article. Note, I sort advice from many “experts” including Dr Roy Spencer (who kindly replied he did not know about Methane). Willis E made a comment which, with my comment, is post after the 2011 article.
Flare it, it is no longer methane, but CO2 and H2O
The amount is so tiny it is totally insignificant.
The concentration of methane in the air is 1.926 ppmv. The reason the concentration is so low is due the initiation of its combustion by discharges of lightning. Everyday there are thousands of discharges of lightning, especially in the tropics.
An important reason for flaring off raw methane from oil operations is that it always contains varying amounts of deadly poisonous hydrogen sulfide, methyl mercaptan and other higher alkyl mercaptans. There are also dialkyl sulfides and disulfides and carbonyl sulfide. Many of these compounds are present in crude oil, especially sour oil. When the raw natural gas or crude oil is purified, these sulfur-containing compounds are flared off as waste refinery gas.
There are many natural sources of methane such swamps, bog, muskegs, ruminate, animals, decaying vegetation, and termites, especially tropical termites. Domestic dairy cows and cattle exhale much methane.
Methane is slightly soluble in water, A liter of ice-cold water can contain 35 mls of methane. That is not very much, but the oceans are enormous. The methane eventually diffuse to the bottom of oceans where it forms methane hydrate (aka methane ice).
The bottom line is that we don’t have to worry too much about methane. The IPCC should stop scaring us.
It was Biden/Harris EPA that formulated the rule based on Harris’ single tie breaking senate vote that passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which contains the methane reduction nonsense.
It is Harris and only Harris that is responsible for this folly. She needs to own it.
Big jet planes with their enormous engines are methane vacuum cleaners. All processes that use air for combustion of fuels burn up the methane. Even forest fires burn up methane.
Typo – parts per billion not per million
Yes, less than 2 PPMv methane concentration with an annual increase of about 0.01 PPMv, less than the precision with which CO2 is reported. Even allowing for 1 PPMv of methane having a CO2-equivalent warming potential of a little over 10X, the annual increase in methane-CO2 equivalence is about 0.1 +/-0.05 PPMv, or about the minimum precision of measured CO2. “Much ado about nothing.”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/03/06/the-misguided-crusade-to-reduce-anthropogenic-methane-emissions
There is no typo. NASA reports the methane concentration as 1,926 ppbv. That is
1.926 ppmv. Why did they do this? Because it makes methane look like a really
bad “menacing molecule”.
I doubt that they can measure methane concentration to +/- 1 part per billion.
yes, my bad, I’d read the “.” as a “,”.
Many wastewater plants have anaerobic digesters to further treat the wastewater.
They produce methane and it is often “burned off”.
Once it’s burned off, it’s no longer methane.
(Swamps also have anaerobic stuff going on at their bottoms. The result is sometimes called “swamp gas”. With the right methane to O2 ratio, pockets of it sometimes (maybe rarely?) ignite.
Such unexplained flashes of light have been given many names throughout history.
Broken record here, but I’ll keep saying it until we have meaningful action.
The Executive Branch has no authority to impose regulations or rules that weren’t specifically passed by Congress. According to the Constitution. Article I says:
“All legislative powers” means only Congress creates laws; not the Executive or Judicial branches. There is no other way to read that.
Just because long-standing precedent going back to the early 20th century has (unconstitutionally, thus illegally) delegated rule-making (“legislative powers”) to Executive Branch agencies does not make any of it legal. The Supreme Court’s recent reversal of the Chevron deference is a step in the right direction. A complete reversal of all the U.S. Code written by the Executive Branch going back to the 1930’s is the correct way to return to constitutional government, where our elected representatives (only) make law, not unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats.
I relish the thought of our legislators actually sweating out legislation instead of grandstanding, voting meaningless “show of support” acts, and passing ridiculous “continuing resolutions” to fund the government and multi-thousand page “emergency” bills to spend trillions of dollars on pet projects; anything but their constitutionally-mandated jobs. Making our legislators debate and try to reauthorize, one-by-one, a hundred years of almost entirely unnecessary and counterproductive rules, regulations, and the agencies funded to enforce them would paste a permanent grin on my face until the day I die.
Our government is out of control.