The Trump administration has taken an axe to environmental regulations—and this week the target became methane gas emissions.
The White House plans to slash laws governing how much methane is emitted from oil and gas wells. This includes relaxing rules around flaring—or burning off excess natural gas at well sites—as well as doing away with a program that requires speedy fixes for large methane leaks. The move also lowers standards for marginal wells, which produce little oil and gas but are responsible for about half of the industry’s methane emissions.
It’s the latest bump in a regulator roller coaster for methane. Attempts to regulate emissions on a federal level began in 2015, when the Obama administration sought to bring methane under the Clean Air Act. The first Trump administration rolled back that rule change. Then, during the Biden administration, the then Democratic-controlled Congress reinstated the methane regulations and cleared the way for the Environmental Protection Agency to apply the new standards to older equipment. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act also included provisions for charges for heavy emitters and allocated money for both industry and research to help them comply with the rules.
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All of that again went out the window with the second Trump administration. As the latest changes start to take effect, here are five things you need to know about methane and the ways that these moves will affect you.
Methane is a major driver of climate change
Carbon dioxide may be more prevalent in the atmosphere, but methane is a heavy hitter, climate-wise. The gas has been responsible for about 30 percent of the rise in global temperatures since the start of the industrial revolution, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). A methane molecule stays in the atmosphere for about 12 years, while an excess carbon dioxide molecule can persist for centuries. But methane traps heat about 80 times more effectively than carbon over 20 years and about 28 times more effectively over the course of a century. In other words, it may be shorter lived, but the damage methane does while it’s in the atmosphere is greater.
Oil and gas leaks are a major source of methane
Each year, according to the IEA, about 580 million metric tons of methane enter the atmosphere. About 40 percent of this comes from natural sources such as swamp gas and volcanic emissions. The other 60 percent comes from human sources.
Agriculture is the biggest contributor to this anthropogenic portion of methane emissions, but the combination of natural gas and petroleum production, processing and transportation comes in second. These processes are responsible for 28 percent of all U.S. methane emissions, according to the EPA.
Methane regulations have done little to move the needle
With all the regulatory back-and-forth, it’s perhaps unsurprising that research into methane emissions finds little evidence that federal rules make a difference. In a recent paper in Communications Earth & Environment, Johns Hopkins University associate professor of environmental health and engineering Scot Miller and his colleagues used satellite data to track emissions independently.
“Overall,” Miller says, “you see this landscape across the U.S. where methane leaks from oil and gas facilities are declining, but it’s not necessarily due to any kind of concerted federal action.”
Methane emissions declined by about 11 percent between 2019 and 2024, but the decline was caused by technological changes in the industry and the establishment of new natural gas pipelines that can carry methane to market—without this transport system, operators often burn off natural gas at well sites.
“If [natural gas is] actually a valuable markable product, there is evidence to show that leak rates tend to go down,” Miller explains.
The new rules would loosen restrictions on the most common oil wells in the U.S.
The new changes are twofold. First, the EPA plans to eliminate the Super Emitter Program, which would have allowed third parties to monitor oil and gas operations for leaks, via satellite, for example, and alert the EPA to leaks of 100 kilograms of methane or more per hour. Operators notified by the EPA of such large leaks would then have to investigate the leaks within days.
The Super Emitter Program has actually never been in effect, so this will make little immediate difference. “This is like the nail in the coffin,” Miller says. “These rules are already not being implemented.”
The other change would affect marginal oil and gas wells. These are wells that produce 15 barrels (2,384 liters) or less of oil per day or 90,000 cubic feet (2,549 cubic meters) or less of natural gas per day over a yearlong period. These wells accounted for 7 percent of U.S. oil and gas production as of 2021, according to the EPA, but produce about 50 percent of the industry’s methane emissions. They’re also plentiful, accounting for more than 70 percent of onshore oil and gas wells.
Each marginal well produces only a little profit, so operators may not have much incentive to invest in repairs and upgrades, Miller says.
“Methane leaks from the oil and gas industry have been declining over time, but these marginal wells are arguably a stubborn outlier,” Miller says. “The regulations proposed during the Biden administration would have helped address this issue.” But they may never come to pass now.
There is broad pushback against regulating methane
Biden administration rules to regulate methane, enacted in 2023, were expected to keep 58 million tons (52.6 million metric tons) of the gas out of the atmosphere between 2024 and 2038. Their rollback is part of a broad push against methane mitigation, however. “I think, potentially, this move would make it more difficult for a future administration to reimplement emissions regulations,” Miller says.
In the European Union, a 2024 regulation would have required methane monitoring and reporting on any imported oil, natural gas and coal. But this month, the European Parliament voted to approve a three-year delay on that regulation.
In another possible blow for methane reduction, the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, which the Senate plans to take up in November, would bar agencies from revoking permits issued during the Trump administration to drill on public land and would make it harder for future administrations to require methane leak monitoring or limits on flaring on public land.
“It’s difficult to have an effective or a consistent federal regulatory policy if those regulations are constantly seesawing up and down,” Miller says.
Disclosure: The reporter’s spouse is employed in the oil and gas industry and owns interests in wells.
