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GOP-led states ask Supreme Court to block speedy methane reductions [1]
['Kelsey Reichmann']
Date: 2024-08
Conservative states asked the justices for emergency intervention over the EPA’s new methane standards that overhaul oil and gas operations.
WASHINGTON (CN) — Two dozen Republican-led states asked the Supreme Court to curb the Biden administration’s methane reduction plan on Tuesday, framing a new rule as an attack on the oil and gas industry.
Headed by Oklahoma, the states filed an emergency appeal to prevent the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from enforcing the New Source Performance Standards — rules aimed at reducing smog-forming volatile compounds.
“The rule’s ‘presumptive standards’ are onerous, imposing costs on the oil and gas industries that will — as even EPA admits — inevitably be passed onto consumers across the country,” the states wrote in their application.
Under the rule, oil and gas producers across the industry’s production, processing transmission and storage segments face new methane and volatile organic compound emission regulations. Existing oil and gas sources like well sites, centralized production facilities and compressor stations will also face new limitations.
The EPA began regulating new oil and gas producers in 2016, but the Trump administration rescinded the regulations in 2020. President Joe Biden’s EPA repealed the 2020 rules and proposed new standards that would not only reimpose the 2016 standards but also apply those regulations to existing oil and gas sources for the first time.
Biden’s standards prohibit all flaring for certain wells, forcing any gas to be recovered, collected and used for a beneficial purpose. Natural gas pumps will have a zero-emissions standard.
According to the EPA, the rule will reduce methane emissions by almost 80% over the next decade and avoid 16 million tons of smog-forming emissions and 590,000 tons of air toxics. The EPA estimated that the new regulations will result in climate and ozone health benefits of almost $100 billion from 2024 to 2038.
The states sued in March and moved to block the rule while their challenge proceeded. They claimed the rule would cause irreparable harm to their sovereign, economic and quasi-sovereign interests.
A unanimous three-judge D.C. Circuit panel rejected the states’ stay request.
The states turned to the Supreme Court, claiming the administration conscripted a “backwater” of the Clean Air Act while “thrashing around for tools to address this administration’s concerns about climate change.”
“Given its effort to revolutionize that unassuming provision to shut down power plants in favor of other sources of generation, and then to impose an impossible-to-meet standard to achieve that same result, EPA’s use of this provision to attack unlawfully the oil and gas industry comes as no surprise,” the states wrote.
The states said the rule would impact hundreds of thousands of facilities, forcing regulators to develop complex plans for a crowd of diverse operations.
“States need more than two years to complete this daunting regulatory task, otherwise they risk ‘submittal of an inadequately prepared plan that EPA would have to review and reject, leading to unnecessary use of already limited resources,’” the states wrote.
The agency framed these developments as a chance for innovation, expanding options for using satellite monitoring, aerial surveys and continuous monitors to find leaks.
However, the states warned these changes would come at a high cost. Kentucky predicted the need to hire at least 100 new employees. Oklahoma said it would need to increase existing permitting and compliance staff by 50%. Ohio projected it would need over $16 million per year to comply with the rule.
If not blocked, the states said they’d be forced to adopt unlawful standards instead of crafting their own.
“The rule effectively forces the states to accept EPA’s ‘presumptive standards,’ thereby limiting the states’ authority to adopt their own standards of performance for regulating methane and VOC emissions from existing facilities,” the states wrote. “That harms the public interest in the cooperative-federalism regime in the Clean Air Act, generally, and Section 111(d), specifically.”
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[1] Url:
https://www.courthousenews.com/gop-led-states-ask-supreme-court-to-block-speedy-methane-reductions/
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