Global warming: Environmentalists want BLM to control harmful fracking pollution - Examiner.com

On Tuesday, three environmental groups; Center for Biological Diversity, Western Environmental Law Center and the Clean Air Task Force, filed a petition to the Bureau of Land Management, which seeks stronger requirements to control methane emissions during the practice of hydraulic fracturing (fracking).

Over a 20 year period, it has been determined that methane gas has been 105 times more harmful than carbon dioxide in contributing to the world’s warming climate.

According to NOAA, this past January to August was the warmest eight month period on record in the United States.

Every year, according to environmental experts, approximately 126 billion cubic feet of methane gas gets vented into the air during the fracking process under federal leases and the amount will continue to increase without control methods in place.

“As climate change heats up our planet, many companies still don't bother to control methane emissions from fracking and drilling on public lands,” said Kassie Siegel, director of the Center’s for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute. “The federal government needs to put a lid on this highly destructive form of pollution. Methane’s far too powerful at driving global warming to let it leak out this way. We can't sit here fiddling while Rome burns.”

According to the Center's statement, the BLM will be called on to require that oil and gas drilling operators install readily available pollution-control measures that would reduce methane gas leaked into the atmosphere during the drilling process. Stopping the leaks would also keep more gas in the pipeline for consumers and add millions of dollars to the federal treasury from royalty payments.

The wasted gas is enough to heat 1.7 million homes for a year.

Fracking is the latest darling of the oil and gas industry, which uses improved multi-stage techniques to literally force access to shale gas and light tight oil, by injecting pressurized fluid deep into numerous layers of soil and rock.

According to the BLM, oil and gas fracking is done at 90 percent of wells drilled on federal lands.

Methane emissions also contribute to serious public-health issues, including increasing incidences of asthma and premature death.

“This isn't about whether oil and gas drilling is good or bad, it’s about whether the Bureau of Land Management is going to clean up sloppy drilling practices that damage our climate,” said Erik Schlenker-Goodrich of the Western Environmental Law Center.

Uncontrolled methane emissions are also an economic concern.

Federal law requires the BLM to protect the environmental, air, atmospheric, water, and other resource values of public lands and prevent their unnecessary or undue degradation.

The BLM is also required to prevent the waste of gas on federal leases and evidence suggests that operators can economically capture at least 40 percent of methane leaks.

“Regulating methane from oil and gas production is absolutely essential to protecting both climate and public health in the U.S.," said Ann Weeks, senior counsel for Clean Air Task Force and one of the signatories to the petition.

BLM has admitted that its regulations have not kept pace with modern oil- and gas-extraction techniques. It has proposed new rules for fracking on federal lands, but those regulations do not address air pollution.

In addition, the Center has recently filed a petition to protect endangered species from the adverse impacts of fracking.