Neurological conditions and other illnesses
The new standards, to be developed by the Environmental Protection Agency under the Clean Air Act, would aim by 2025 to cut methane emissions by up to 45 percent from levels recorded in 2012. They would also slash the spread of volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, key components of ground-level smog that have been linked to cancer, neurological conditions and other illnesses.
In November, President Barack Obama pledged to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by up to 28 percent by 2025 as part of a climate accord with China.
“We can begin to slow the events of climate change and leave a more clean and stable environment for future generations,” Dan Utech, deputy assistant to the president for energy and climate change, said in a teleconference with reporters Wednesday, calling the planned reductions an “ambitious goal.”
The new standards are expected to be unveiled this summer and finalized next year, White House and EPA officials said. The Interior Department will also draw up new regulations for oil and gas sites on federal land.
Nearly a third of the nation’s methane emissions in 2012 came from oil and gas operations, chiefly from the tens of thousands of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling sites that have fueled the nation’s energy boom of the past decade. And while methane accounts for just 9 percent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions overall, it has 20 to 25 times the heat-trapping potential of carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas.