President Joe Biden has signed legislation that paves the way for more fulsome regulation of U.S. methane emissions, a contributor to global climate change. Our industry takes our central role in reducing U.S. methane emissions seriously and has been hard at work reducing methane emissions rates in the largest producing regions — a model that could be replicated worldwide.
Methane is a greenhouse gas emitted from agriculture, landfills, and energy production, and it is the main component of natural gas. China is the world’s largest emitter of methane emissions, yet the United States is close behind.
While natural gas and oil producers have reduced methane emissions from production and transmission, we’re continuously developing new technologies and processes to make further progress as our industry works with the Biden administration on the direct regulation of methane from new and existing sources. It’s one way America can act on climate while also developing the energy needed for economic growth and national security.
Critically important in this is the Environmental Partnership, whose 90 upstream and midstream companies represent nearly three-quarters of new U.S. onshore natural gas and oil production. Since its launch in 2017, the partnership has created action programs targeting key sources of methane emissions as identified by the Environmental Protection Agency, including a new flare management program to reduce flare volumes, promote beneficial uses of associated gas, improve flare reliability and efficiency, and collect valuable data to calculate flare intensity as the key metric to gauge year-to-year progress.
Working together — sharing information, best practices, and technologies — members of the partnership have helped shape an environment in which total methane emissions from U.S. natural gas systems have fallen, according to the EPA, even as marketed natural gas production has increased more than 90% since 2005.
Indeed, methane emissions per unit of production, which measures emissions intensity, fell nearly 70% between 2011 and 2019 across five of the major producing regions, according to data from the EPA and the U.S. Energy Information Administration. This indicates the industry’s efforts on efficiency measures designed to reduce emissions were successful.
Tackling the two-part challenge of addressing climate change and meeting the world’s growing demand for energy requires a range of solutions and partners. And U.S. energy producers have made significant progress, yet more can be done by our industry, the government, and other industries.
Building on progress to date, the industry recently released a comprehensive blueprint to meet the challenge of supplying the world’s growing need for energy while simultaneously ushering in a lower-carbon future. In our “Climate Action Framework,” we highlighted how reducing emissions and delivering energy are fundamentally connected and how governments, industries, and consumers together can achieve both.
The framework calls for accelerating technologies and innovation and furthering actions to mitigate methane emissions, such as improved detection technologies. It endorses an economywide government carbon price policy as the most effective and transparent way to achieve meaningful progress. It commits industry to continue developing cleaner fuels and to advance consistent and transparent reporting of greenhouse gas emissions.
Our industry is at the center of this challenge, and we accept that role. Throughout our industry’s history, we have tackled problems based on sound science with ingenuity and hard work. We are doing that today, taking leading actions to protect the environment while also providing the energy used all over the world.
Kevin O’Scannlain is vice president of upstream policy at the American Petroleum Institute.
