WASHINGTON (CN) — A D.C. Circuit panel on Tuesday rejected a bid by a group of 24 Republican attorneys general to pause a new Environmental Protection Agency rule designed to reduce methane emissions from players in the oil and gas industry as they appeal the government’s move in court.
The new requirements under the Clean Air Act ask oil and gas producers to more strictly monitor their methane emissions — limiting routine flaring and creating a new program for “super emitters,” or large emission occurrences. It also asks that the industry update its equipment to better detect methane leaks from existing sources. New oil and gas companies will be subject to tighter restrictions.
Rosalie Winn, the director and lead counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund, applauded the refusal to stay, saying it would have allowed more methane pollution into the air during litigation. The environmental advocacy group is backing the EPA in the appeal.
“EPA’s commonsense oil and gas methane protections deliver vital reductions in climate and health-harming pollution,” Winn said in a statement, calling the suit a “meritless legal attack.”
“The court’s decision today ensures that the safeguards will begin to deliver benefits to communities that have long been overburdened by oil and gas pollution,” Winn said.
Methane leaks have been said to be the largest source of toxic emissions that contribute to ground level ozone that causes smog and asthma as well as climate change, with more than 80 times the warming capacity of carbon dioxide.
Published in the Federal Register on March 8, the requirements went into effect on May 7 and states have two years to implement the new measures.
The coalition of two dozen states, led by Oklahoma, initially filed suit on March 15 claiming the EPA had imposed “onerous new requirements.”
In a press release accompanying the suit, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond called the rule a “a blatant attack on America’s oil and gas industry.”
“If allowed to take full effect, the rule would cost Oklahoma countless jobs, devastate the oil and gas industry, and force us to pay significantly higher energy prices,” Drummond said.
“The rule will impose millions of dollars of costs on the States, and those costs are starting to tally up right now. Yet the rule is legally unsound. It unlawfully deprives States of the discretion that Congress granted them. And it holds the states to a two-year deadline that will prove impossible to meet,” the states say in the lawsuit.
U.S. Circuit Judges Gregory Katsas, Neomi Rao, and Michelle Childs of the D.C. Circuit — two Donald Trump appointees and a Biden appointee, respectively — denied the request for a stay Tuesday.
States joining Oklahoma in the suit include: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming. Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a separate legal challenge in the D.C. Circuit that has been consolidated with the other states’ challenge.