Tag
oil and gas industry
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Don’t Let the Senate Waste the BLM Methane Rule!
On February 3, the House of Representatives passed a resolution under the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to kill the Methane Waste Rule — a recent Bureau of Land Management (BLM) effort to restrict the waste of natural gas from oil and gas development on federal and tribal lands. A companion…
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Moving Forward: Final Methane Rule is Progress, But We Still Have Much to Do
Finally. After years of information gathering and analysis, EPA recently signed new source performance standards that will address methane and VOC pollution from new and modified sources within the oil and gas sector (“Final Rule”), EPA’s first-ever methane standards. EPA estimates that this rule is expected to prevent 300,000 short…
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Voluntary Methane Reduction Efforts Will Still Fall Short of Methane Reduction Goal
On March 30th, at a session of the Global Methane Forum in Washington, DC, the EPA launched its Methane Challenge Program to encourage companies to voluntarily reduce methane emissions in the oil and gas sector. This program seeks to build on the work of the EPA Natural Gas STAR Program…
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Another Important Step Forward: BLM Proposes Long-Awaited Waste Rule
The U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM’s) update to its decades-old regulations that address the waste of natural gas on Federally-managed land has been much anticipated. The wait is over—BLM’s proposed rule has finally been published, and there is much to be excited about in the…
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The Stage is Set for the Obama Administration’s Last Act on Climate
For over seven years, the Obama Administration has pushed forward a series of policies to cut greenhouse gases from the biggest industrial sources in the U.S. President Obama first issued a Climate Action Plan, and established a series of targets for the US to meet: 17% below 2005 levels by…
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First Aliso Canyon, Then the Rest of the Oil and Gas System
On October 23, 2015 a massive natural gas leak was detected and subsequently demonstrated by infrared camera at the Aliso Canyon underground gas storage facility near the Porter Ranch section of Los Angeles, California. Over 2,000 residents have been relocated away from the leak and schools in the area have…
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EPA’s Proposed Standards for New Sources of Methane Pollution: Still a Good First Step
On Thursday, December 3, CATF joined dozens of environmental, health, business, labor and Latino organizations to deliver over 775,000 public comments to EPA on the proposed NSPS rule for methane emissions from new and modified sources in the oil and gas industry. Boxes containing the comments (pictured below) were received…
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A Good First Step – But We Have a Long Way to go on Oil and Gas
Earlier this week USEPA took a long-awaited and critical first step to reduce emissions of the potent greenhouse gas methane from the oil and gas industry. Oil and gas is the largest industrial source of methane pollution, and the standards for methane will also reduce pollution that causes ozone smog…