The Environmental Protection Agency says its proposal to stop greenhouse gas reporting for big polluters could save oil and gas companies up to $256 million a year. Some of them are countering that it could hurt their business instead.
Companies, industry trade groups and other energy experts warn that axing the more than a decade-old Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program could immediately jeopardize oil and gas firms’ ability to claim highly valued tax credits. It could also hurt companies selling liquefied natural gas, or LNG, to Asia andEurope in the future, they say, where less carbon-intensive energy sources are increasingly more desirable.
Halting emissions reporting introduces “significant uncertainty for producers” and “unnecessary complexity into programs that are critical for deploying the very solutions needed to meet energy and climate goals,” said Dustin Meyer, a senior vice president at the American Petroleum Institute, in public testimony at an EPA October hearing on the proposal.
API, which has nearly 600 members including Chevron Corp and Exxon Mobil Corp., is a major industry group pushing to keep the program, which requires the nation’s biggest industrial polluters to calculate and report their annual greenhouse gas emissions every year. Exxon declined to comment on the proposal. Chevron, meanwhile, did not respond to requests for comment.
This reporting program “has no material impact on improving human health and the environment,” said an EPA spokesperson in an email, and killing it would allow companies more space to put their money on activities with “actual, tangible environmental impacts.”
The data it collects representsthe the nation’s main record of large industrial emissions, which is publicly accessible online. It underpins US tax credits claims designed to incentivize capturing and storing carbon dioxide underground, rather than releasing it into the atmosphere where it contributes to global warming. It’s also used by states to track progress on their climate goals, by investors to inform decisions on energy ventures and by advocates to educate communities on nearby pollution sources.