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1 1 (December 22, 2022)

handle is hein.crs/govejxa0001 and id is 1 raw text is: Congressional ______ ~ Research Service The Debate over Venting and Flaring on Federal Lands December 22, 2022 On November 30, 2022, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) published a proposed rule intended to address the venting and flaring of natural gas by energy production operations on federal and tribal lands. Past agency attempts to promulgate a lasting rule on this issue have been affected by litigation (described further below), including questions over the authority that Congress has granted BLM to regulate such activities. This Legal Sidebar will briefly review the history of those attempts and describe the provisions that the Biden Administration has proposed. Regulation and Litigation Under the Obama Administration Drilling and extracting fossil fuels can result in the release of natural gas as part of the drilling process or due to leakage within the installed production systems. Operators vent (release directly into the atmosphere) or flare (burn) some natural gas that they captured for commercial use. Operators commonly use these practices for operational, safety, and economic reasons, and they trigger a number of concerns related to waste and environmental harm. In particular, vented methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, and flared methane releases carbon dioxide and other pollutants into the atmosphere. The BLM, an agency within the Department of the Interior, is tasked with administering certain public lands under the control of the federal government and with administering the onshore federal mineral estate. The principal statute governing onshore oil and natural gas production on federal lands is the Mineral Leasing Act (MLA), which requires (among other things) that leases under the Act include a condition that the lessee will use all reasonable precautions to prevent waste of oil or gas. Under that statutory requirement, BLM published a set of regulations concerning venting and flaring on federal lands in late 2016 (Waste Prevention Rule). These regulations replaced BLM's previous standards for venting and flaring on federal lands as articulated in a 1980 Notice to Lessees. (NTL-4A). The NTL- 4A had provided limited authorization to vent or flare only in certain circumstances and clarified that lessees would not owe royalties to the government on vented or flared gas. The 2016 regulations prohibited avoidable losses due to venting and flaring, condoning flaring only when such losses are unavoidable and prohibiting venting entirely except in certain narrow cases (e.g., where flaring is not an option for technical reasons, when there is an emergency, or during certain natural gas production processes). The regulations also obliged operators to capture a certain percentage of produced gas Congressional Research Service https://crsreports.congress.gov LSB10882 CRS Legal Sidebar Prepared for Members and Committees of Congress

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