Boulder County Public Health pleads with EPA not to relax methane regulations

Dec. 11--The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, acting on an executive order from President Donald Trump, in August proposed several new rules to reduce emission standards for new, reconstructed and modified oil and gas developments.

On Tuesday, Boulder County Public Health released its official comments, pleading with the agency to reverse course.

"We would like to strongly encourage the EPA to reconsider these proposed changes," Jeffrey Zayach, executive director at Boulder County Public Health, wrote in the statement. "Air quality studies Indicate a need for increased emissions reductions. ... While the state of Colorado has its own set of air quality regulations for sources in the oil and gas sector, controls at the federal level are the most protective for the entire country and are generally more permanent than state-level controls."

If the new rules are enacted, all emission regulations for transmission and storage equipment -- including compressor stations, pneumatic controllers and underground storage vessels -- would be dropped, and emission limits for methane at production and processing facilities would be eliminated.

While limits on volatile organic compounds, which include methane, would remain in place, the EPA estimated that, as a result of the relaxed regulations, an additional 370,000 tons of methane -- the equivalent of 8.4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide -- 10,000 tons of volatile organic compounds, and 300 tons of hazardous air pollutants will be emitted into the atmosphere by 2025.

The new rules would save the oil and gas industry anywhere from $17 million to $19 million a year over the next five years, according to the EPA.

While the EPA asserted the new rules "would remove regulatory duplication and save the industry millions of dollars in compliance costs each year while maintaining health and environmental protection from oil and gas sources the agency considers appropriate to regulate," Zayach and Boulder County Public Health argued the reduced regulations would have a direct impact on the health of residents.

"The revisions to this rule and the allowance of increased emissions would contravene EPA's mission to protect human and environmental health," Zayach wrote. "Public health will suffer from air quality and climate degradation due to decreased federal controls."

Under current EPA regulations, and despite the Colorado Air Quality Control Commission enacting stricter methane regulations starting in 2004, methane emissions from oil and gas developments continue to rise at a rate of 3.4% per year, according to a 2019 study conducted by the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration and the University of Colorado Boulder. While that rate is lower than some have previously reported, Zayach said it's still too much.

Allowing additional methane equivalent to 8.4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide to remain in the atmosphere for at least five years will not only lead to higher rates of respiratory problems, he stated, but also will accelerate climate change.

"To protect our residents, particularly our children and elderly residents, who are most impacted by poor air quality and changes to climate, we must continue to reduce methane emissions from oil and gas sources," he wrote. "These studies clearly indicate that in Colorado -- a state with its own oil and gas regulations that are generally more stringent than EPA's current regulations, oil and gas pollution still has a significant negative impact on our air quality."

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