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Fracked release date3/30/2023 So NRDC issues a challenge to the operators and equipment manufacturers: Get rolling on green completions now. Devon Energy Corp., with operations in Colorado, Louisiana, New Mexico and other states, has also already adopted green completions. Take Southwestern Energy Co., for example, a natural gas drilling and producing company operating Arkansas and Pennsylvania, which already practices green completions at no extra cost. Thankfully, the standards do include incentives for early adoption of green completions - operators who choose to use this technology before January 2015 will be able to avoid their wells being categorized as “modifications” and thus avoid certain state permitting requirements that go along with that designation.įurthermore, we know that there are good actors out in the field. As we’ve shown here and here, the natural gas industry has plenty of capacity and capability to weld the needed tanks and pipes and mount them on trucks and trailers.Ĭommunities living near existing and new well fields shouldn’t have to wait more than two more years for full safeguards. The delay responds to API claims that they don’t currently have enough of the truck-mounted equipment needed to service every fracked well and building the equipment will take many years. During the next two-and-a-half years, new and refracked wells will have to flare off the escaping pollution, but flaring will still result in huge amounts of pollution and unnecessarily wastes valuable natural gas. Unfortunately, the standards allow until January 2015 to fully comply with green completion requirements. The exemption would have swallowed the rule, leaving the pollution from most wells and other emission points uncontrolled. But despite industry’s attempts to paint them as trivial, these wells are huge sources of air pollution. EPA fended off a concerted attack by API and others who attempted, in the final few weeks, to open a giant loophole for wells based on their supposedly low concentrations of VOCs. The final standards require green completions on all newly fracked and refracked wells (with the exceptions of so-called “wildcat” or “delineation” wells that are not near pipeline infrastructure for routing captured gases, and low pressure wells). In fact, they pay for themselves in as little as three months. As the NRDC report explains, these relatively inexpensive technologies pay for themselves because they capture or prevent leakage of gases that operators can resell. Other required technologies will prevent leakage of hundreds of thousands of tons of pollution from other sources on the well pad, and from associated storage tanks and processing plants. Using this “green completion” equipment will achieve most of the pollution reductions achieved by the standards. The most important measure will curb the whoosh of dangerous pollution from newly fracked or refracked wells, using truck-mounted tanks to capture millions of tons of valuable gases that can be sold at a profit instead of leaked into the air. EPA’s NSPS pollution standards are based on proven technologies that save industry money, as described in a recent NRDC report. The standards fall under two Clean Air Act programs, New Source Performance Standards (NSPS) and National Emission Standards for Hazardous Pollutants (NESHAPs). With these measures the agency is greatly improving control of the trio of dangerous air pollutants - cancer-causing benzene, smog-forming volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and methane, a potent greenhouse gas - coming from this booming industry. Largely rejecting a campaign by the American Petroleum Institute for loopholes that you could drive a drilling rig through, the final standards retain the vast majority of the core pollution control requirements for new and modified facilities that EPA proposed last year. By issuing standards today to control the harmful stew of air pollution from the oil and gas industry, the Environmental Protection Agency took an important step towards making good on President Obama’s State of the Union pledge to clean-up natural gas production – in particular hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking” - to protect public health.
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