The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Tuesday published the first federal regulations regining in emissions from natural gas wells that use hyrdraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” the process of blasting water and other liquid chemicals into rock to release the gas. The new rules strike a clever compromise between the natural gas industry and clean air advocates.
In a win for clean air advocates, the rules make no exemptions for smaller companies, requiring all to eventually capture airborne fracking emissions as soon as they come out of the ground, using portable tanks called “green converters,” which will prevent them from entering the air in the first place.
The EPA estimates that this process can reduce emissions by 95 percent.
Already, upwards of half of the natural gas wells in the U.S. rely on green converters, but the others that haven’t told the EPA ahead of the rulemaking that implementing such technology would be a costly and burdensome process, and asked for a delay at the least, which the EPA granted: Companies will have until 2015 to switch completely over to “green converters.”
In the mean time, companies will be able to burn off the emissions in a process known as “flaring,” which reduces many emissions, but not nitrogen oxides, which contribute to smog formation.
Other emissions produced by fracking include voltalie organic compounds, which can cause smog, hexane, a carcinogen, and methane, which contributes to global warming.
Environmental advocacy group The Natural Resources Defense Council and fracking-supporter The American Petroleum Institute both praised the new rules as sensible.
