Emissions

Four companies — Kinder Morgan Inc., National Grid, Southern Company Gas and Southwestern Energy Co. — have joined a voluntary Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) program to reduce methane emissions from the oil and gas industry, the agency said last week.

Federal appeals court judges posed tough questions to both sides of the dispute over the Obama administration’s proposed Clean Power Plan (CPP), but a ruling is not expected for months, and the entire issue may not be settled until 2018, according to an attorney who attended last month’s oral arguments.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Thursday issued finalized recommendations to smog-afflicted states for controlling volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions from oil/natural gas equipment. The guidelines — not rules — would apply to more wells than an earlier draft.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has agreed to review standards for measuring volatile organic compounds (VOC) from elevated and enclosed ground flares at natural gas production sites.

A group of more than 200 veterans, including two retired major generals, urged the Department of Interior’s (DOI) Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to require oil and gas companies leasing on public land to capture or eliminate methane gas emissions.

Mild weather, coupled with a steep decrease in coal consumption, contributed to the lowest level of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the U.S. energy sector since the first six months of 1991, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) said Wednesday.

The global increase in methane emissions over the past decade has been more the result of naturally occurring biogenic sources in wetlands and landfills than from fossil fuel operations, such as hydraulic fracturing (fracking), according to British-led research published this month in the American Geophysical Union’s journal, Global Biogeochemical Cycles.

Thanks in large part to coal-to-gas switching, yearly carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the power sector will likely fall below CO2 emitted from transportation for the first time in nearly 40 years, according to a technical brief published this month by the University of Michigan Energy Institute.

With the four-month-long natural gas storage well leak at Aliso Canyon still roiling, Southern California Gas Co. (SoCalGas) engineers said they have successfully tested a methane capture system on a 2.5-mile distribution pipeline replacement project.