The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has come under fire from House Republicans for its Methane Emissions Reduction Program.
The new regulations were introduced at COP28 in Dubai last month. These new regulations have been built on the foundation of the previous “Clean Air Act” and aim at aggressively reducing methane emissions through oil and gas production.
Rep. Bill Johnson (R-Ohio) on Wednesday presided over a hearing discussing the alleged “EPA overreach” of the new methane regulations.
Expressing concerns over the harm the new regulations would do to small and medium sized oil and gas producers, he stated, “These companies are not ‘Big Oil’, as is so often described. On average they employ just 12 people, and this suite of methane regulations will crush these producers.”
Republicans have emphasized that the regulations do more harm than good, and would inadvertently result in:
- High energy prices for consumers.
- Low production from small oil and gas producers.
They also allege that the new rules do not take into consideration the existing measures that producers have taken to limit emissions.
Two small oil and gas producers- Michael Oestmann of Tall City Exploration and Patrick Montalban of Montalban Oil and Gas Operations, also testified at the hearing and backed these claims.
Montalban expressed that the weight of fulfilling the requirements of the new regulation would be crushing for small producers and result in lower or eventually no production from these businesses.
Earlier, Rep. Johnson in his statement pointed out that small and medium oil producers make about 91% of the production.
However, some peculiarities were noticed in the statements of the two small producers- portions of their statements were extremely similar, and had the same author: big oil.
In the prepared statements that were submitted to the Energy and Commerce Committee and posted online earlier this week, Oustmann wrote, “I understand the need for addressing environmental protection while achieving economic success in oil and gas production, but there is a right way and a wrong way to approach the issue.”
While in the hearing Montalban said, “I would welcome the opportunity to work with this committee and anyone else who is interested in working to find a constructive way forward to balance environmental protection with economic success. … But there is a right way … and there is the wrong way: this administration’s approach.”
The metadata of the PDFs of the statements uploaded online reveals that the author of both the documents was Christopher Kearney, an oil lobbyist with the Ferguson Group.
Reacting to this information the spokesperson of democrats in the Energy and Commerce Committee told E&E News, “Republicans have been parroting fossil fuel industry talking points for years, and the fact an oil and gas lobbyist wrote near-identical testimonies for two of their witnesses today is just the latest example of how embedded they are with their polluter friends.”
