Author
David McCabe
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Nationwide Standards are Key to Reducing Emissions from Oil and Gas
Recently oil and gas industry lobbyists have been excitedly reporting about how the industry has “substantially reduced methane emissions” through voluntary efforts. For example, Energy in Depth, a project of the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA), has produced an infographictouting reductions in methane emissions from selected oil and gas…
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Clean Up All Local Gas Distribution Leaks (Not Just Underground!)
The US Department of Energy and EPA’s Inspector General have called attention in the past two weeks to an important issue – harmful methane emissions from the systems that distribute natural gas in cities and towns. There’s been some effort to clean up methane from natural gas systems in recent…
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Study Shows EPA Underestimates Methane Emissions from Natural Gas Production and Demonstrates Need for Tough National Standards
A recently published article (Brandt et al.) assessed methane leakage rates from the natural gas sector and concluded that “official inventories consistently underestimate actual CH4 emissions, with the [natural gas] and oil sectors as important contributors…” The report stacks up 20 years of research—with different scales and seemingly different findings—along…
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New Rules for Gas: Good Policy, Delayed
Last week, EPA announced New Source Performance Standards (NSPS) for the oil and natural gas industry. These new rules are an important and long-awaited step towards better control of the air pollution emitted by this rapidly expanding sector. Notably, the standards include the first federal air pollution regulations for hydraulically…
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Memo To EPA: Stay Strong On Oil and Gas Standards
Next week, EPA will issue final New Source Performance Standards (NSPS) for conventional air emissions from the oil and natural gas industry. The standards must require the capture of hundreds of thousands of tons of smog-forming emissions emitted annually by this industry, along with millions of tons of methane. Methane…
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Methane from Oil and Gas: Low-hanging Fruit that EPA Must Pick
November 30th was the last day for public comments on EPA’s proposal to significantly update air emissions limits for most of the oil and natural gas industry. The proposal makes much-needed revisions to existing requirements, which in some cases are over 25 years old, and in expanding the coverage of…
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Making Sense of Gas vs. Coal and Climate: A Look at the Recent Paper by Tom Wigley
The last few months have seen a flurry of academic papers investigating whether using natural gas for power generation creates more global warming than using coal for power generation. A few have reached the startling conclusion that using gas for power is just as bad, or worse, than coal. The…
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Can We Control Black Carbon in the Arctic by Reducing Agricultural Fires?
One long day down, and one to go at a global meeting in St. Petersburg, Russia, where climate scientists, fire experts, farmers, regulators and NGOs have been discussing the role of springtime fires on climate change in the Arctic and what must be done to reduce the occurrence of set…
