EPA’s plans to continue regulating methane emissions at oil and gas sites could complicate its legal defense of a broader rule to end climate regulation.
Congress explicitly directed EPA to govern methane pollution at oil industry facilities through the Clean Air Act. And the agency has indicated that it would keep a Biden-era methane rule on the books — with changes to deadlines and other requirements that the industry has asked for.
But the rule’s survival could make it harder for the Trump administration to justify its repeal of the so-called endangerment finding, the scientific declaration that underpinned most climate rules for almost two decades, because it could undercut EPA’s central argument that Congress never authorized climate regulations at all. It took less than a week for environmental groups and Democratic attorneys general to sue the administration over its repeal of the endangerment finding earlier this month. The methane rule could become a feature of the legal challenges.
“It seems to me that the methane rule is inconvenient for the legal arguments that the EPA wants to make to rescind the endangerment finding and repeal the vehicle standards, because the heart of those arguments is that Congress never really has provided clear authorization for regulation of greenhouse gas emissions,” said Kyle Danish, an attorney with Van Ness Feldman.
In an article published earlier this week, Danish argues that the endangerment finding rescission rule “may have a methane problem” that shows up in court.
The methane rule relies on the same reading of the law that EPA contested in its endangerment finding repeal.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in announcing the rescission Feb. 12 that “the Obama administration twisted itself into some kind of mental pretzel to invoke authority it didn’t have, they side-stepped Congress.”
But Congress has endorsed Clean Air Act rules for methane, wrote Danish, and that “presents problems for EPA’s defense of the rescission action.”
The climate rule EPA wants to keep
EPA’s repeal of the endangerment finding was designed to make it easier for the Trump administration to quickly unravel Biden-era climate standards for coal and gas power plants, airplanes, and decades-old emissions-reporting requirements. It rescinded vehicle emissions rules — the primary target of the original endangerment finding — as part of the same package this month.
But it spared the methane rule — a rare exception for a president who has largely torn down the federal apparatus for confronting climate change. EPA has signaled it plans to tweak, rather than cancel, the 2024 methane standards that govern how the oil and gas sector must find and fix leaky infrastructure that allows the powerful greenhouse gas to escape into the air. Those rules are currently on pause while EPA reviews them.
The administration’s most recent regulatory agenda shows that EPA was planning to propose an updated methane rule last November, but it never did. EPA declined to give a new timeline for the rule’s release. A minor revision of a narrow set of the rule’s provisions is now under White House review and could be finalized soon.
One reason the administration plans to keep regulating methane is because large oil and gas companies support it. Industry groups cite federal rules as a way companies can prove their environmental bona fides to investors and for export to countries that prioritize climate action.
American Petroleum Institute regulatory affairs lead Dustin Meyer asserted on the day EPA issued its endangerment finding repeal that “we continue to support smart, effective federal regulation of emissions — including methane from oil and gas operations.”
EPA would also face legal hurdles if it were to remove all oil and gas methane regulation. The first Trump administration tried that in 2020, and both chambers of a Democrat-controlled Congress passed a resolution of disapproval under the Congressional Review Act that, lawyers said, bars EPA from issuing a substantially similar rule in the future without new congressional action.
“EPA can’t fully rescind methane regulation for the oil and gas sector. That the impact of that CRA,” said Alexandra Schluntz, an attorney with Earthjustice who works on oil and gas issues.
Then in 2022, Congress enacted a sprawling climate spending bill that created a new methane fee for oil and gas — and tied exemptions within it to compliance with a Clean Air Act rule that was at least as stringent as the one the Biden EPA had proposed a year earlier. Last summer, the GOP-controlled Congress paused the so-called waste emissions charge for 10 years as part of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, but it didn’t repeal the methane fee or the exemptions related to methane regulations.
“So I think that that provides a strong independent basis for the methane rules for oil and gas,” said Schluntz.
Danish said the risk to EPA now is that the scientific underpinnings for methane regulation — that it endangers public health and welfare by contributing to climate change — are so similar to the now-defunct endangerment finding.
‘Dents’ in EPA’s legal reasoning
The original 2009 endangerment finding applied to new motor vehicles, while stationary sources like oil wells and storage facilities are regulated under Section 111 of the Clean Air Act. But both rules rely on the same scientific declaration that greenhouse gases drive warming that endangers public health and welfare. If anything, EPA faces a higher bar in regulating stationary sources under Section 111 than it does in setting standards for motor vehicles — like the ones it just scrapped along with the endangerment finding.
That’s because Section 202(a), which covers emissions from new cars and trucks, allows EPA to make an endangerment finding wherever it finds harmful pollution. But Section 111 limits regulation to pollution that “causes, or contributes significantly” to endangerment.
That implies that under the Clean Air Act, motor vehicles should be regulated for a pollutant before stationary sources like oil wells are, because EPA doesn’t have to prove that they contribute to endangerment “significantly.”
EPA’s repeal this month also contended that it would be “futile” to regulate new motor vehicles for greenhouse gases because they are responsible for only a tiny fraction of atmospheric emissions and thus would “have no material impact on the global climate change concerns animating this regulatory program.”
But motor vehicles are the highest-emitting sector in the U.S. economy. Transportation broadly is responsible for almost 30 percent of U.S. emissions, while oil and gas operations are directly responsible for about 3.3 percent, according to EPA data.
So if curbing vehicle emissions has “no material impact” on global temperatures, as EPA contends in its endangerment rescission, petroleum facilities must have even less, Danish said.
“The methane standards create some dents in the EPA’s fundamental legal arguments for rescinding the endangerment finding,” he said.
But Jeff Holmstead, who served as EPA’s air chief under former President George W. Bush, said Congress’ 2021 CRA resolution invalidating the first Trump EPA’s repeal of the Obama methane rules gives the agency the legal authority it needs to retain the Biden rules without any new analysis of endangerment.
“If I were at EPA, I would just point to that and say, ‘Congress said we couldn’t issue a new rule that is substantially the same as the [2020] rule revoking the methane standards,’ and that would be certainly a legal rationale for leaving it in place even though they’ve eliminated the 2009 endangerment finding,” he said.
Holmstead said that while the endangerment finding repeal opens the door for EPA to reconsider rulemakings for source categories other than motor vehicles, it doesn’t compel EPA to do so for every rulemaking. And it would be difficult to sue the agency for continuing to regulate oil and gas methane, given that any new rule would only make existing standards easier to comply with, he added.
“I don’t see who could possibly have standing to try to sue them,” he said.
But Holmstead acknowledged that EPA lawyers might face arguments in court that the agency’s new policy on endangerment is being applied inconsistently across sectors.
“We all know that there are a number of arguments that will be used to challenge the rescission of the endangerment finding, and I suspect that will be one of them,” he said.
