A new release before the Thanksgiving holiday was an operator survey sent by the EPA to approximately 15,000 producers all across the states. This operator survey selected specific sites for many of these producers for analysis. It seeks out multiple segment of the onshore Oil & Gas industry, including booster facilities, gas processing, & storage facilities. This will have no bearing on any offshore production or natural gas facilities that provide power to homes. This ICR is different from the Greenhouse Gas Reporting program in that it will not tie into the reporting these companies must already provide to the EPA.
Knowing that this is a cumbersome load that the EPA is asking of these production companies, they have made accommodations to the final ICR. One major change is the response time to the ICR deadlines. They have given 60 days to respond to the initial operator survey and 180 days to respond to a facilities survey. This is quite the increase from the second revision of the ICR.
What does the mean for the Oil & Gas industry?
The EPA’s initial release of the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program was a major step in discovering that methane emissions were much higher than previously understood. These are sources that were not covered by the original NSPS issued on May 12th. With that being said, this ICR is the first step in rectifying those changes that need to be made to our methane emissions footprint. This reporting data collected by the ICR will serve as a foundation to making those necessary changes, and will also improve on new regulations that will reduce emissions in the ever changing Oil & Gas industry.
