NY Times, Sept. 15, 2020
A Secret Recording Reveals Oil Executives’ Private Views on Climate Change
By Hiroko Tabuchi
Last summer, oil and gas-industry groups were lobbying to overturn
federal rules on leaks of natural gas, a major contributor to climate
change. Their message: The companies had emissions under control.
In private, the lobbyists were saying something very different.
At a discussion convened last year by the Independent Petroleum
Association of America, a group that represents energy companies,
participants worried that producers were intentionally flaring, or
burning off, far too much natural gas, threatening the industry’s image,
according to a recording of the meeting reviewed by The New York Times.
“We’re just flaring a tremendous amount of gas,” said Ron Ness,
president of the North Dakota Petroleum Council, at the June 2019
gathering, held in Colorado Springs. “This pesky natural gas,” he said.
“The value of it is very minimal,” particularly to companies drilling
mainly for oil.
A well can produce both oil and natural gas, but oil commands far higher
prices. Flaring it is an inexpensive way of getting rid of the gas.
Yet the practice of burning it off, producing dramatic flares and
attracting criticism, represented a “huge, huge threat” to the
industry’s efforts to portray natural gas as a cleaner and more
climate-friendly energy source, he said, and that was damaging the
industry’s image, particularly among younger generations.
“What’s our message going forward?” Mr. Ness said. “What’s going to
stick with those young people and make them support oil and gas?”
The recording runs 1 hour 22 minutes, opening with a moderator’s remarks
and concluding with a panel discussion that covered a wide range of
issues including job creation, the threats posed by solar and wind
energy, and the federal leasing of oil and gas rights. The audio was
provided by an organization dedicated to tracking climate policy that
said the recording had been made by an industry official who attended
the meeting.
Neither the organization nor the official was willing to be identified,
out of concerns for industry retaliation, but three people heard in the
recording, including the event’s moderator, Ryan Ullman of the
Independent Petroleum Association, said that it reflected their
comments. Jennifer Pett Marsteller, an association spokeswoman,
confirmed the meeting’s date, location and speakers’ list, which matched
the recording. She declined to comment on the speakers’ remarks, saying
there was no official recording.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Ness, Kristen Hamman, declined to confirm his
remarks, saying that the Independent Petroleum Association had not
produced an official transcript of the meeting that would allow her to
do a comparison. Mr. Ness has publicly spoken against the need to
strengthen regulation of methane, a major component in natural gas,
calling stronger rules “an unnecessary burden” and saying the industry
already produced “valuable energy resources in a responsible manner.”
The remarks reflect the concerns of an industry that has presented
itself as part of the solution to climate change, and natural gas as an
important “bridge fuel” that can help the world shift away from coal,
the dirtiest-burning energy source, toward renewable energy.
Natural gas, when burned (whether in a flare, or to fuel a household
oven), typically emits just half the planet-warming greenhouse gases
that coal does. But by flaring off natural gas, rather than capturing it
for use, companies are creating pollution without creating usable energy.
Many companies do directly drill for and capture natural gas for use.
But researchers have warned that drilling for the gas also causes
sizable leaks of methane directly into the atmosphere, which is even
more damaging for the climate than flaring the gas. Methane can also
escape faulty flares, and companies sometimes also deliberately release
the gas from wells and pipelines in a practice known as venting.
Methane can trap more than 80 times more heat in the earth’s atmosphere
than carbon dioxide, over the shorter term. Research has shown that
methane emissions from oil and gas production are far larger than
previously estimated.
To address the issue, the Obama administration had proposed new
regulations that would have required, among other measures, that oil and
gas companies install technology to detect and fix methane leaks from
their wells, pipelines and storage facilities.
But a coalition of oil and gas companies pushed the Trump administration
to abandon those rules. It said the industry was already regulated by
state laws and was already equipped to plug leaks on its own without
federal rules. Lobbyists argued that the companies were already
incentivized to rein in methane emissions, given that gas is a valuable
resource.
“The oil and natural gas industry has a pure economic incentive to
prevent every molecule of ‘pollutant’ from escaping to the atmosphere,”
wrote James D. Elliott, a lawyer representing a coalition of oil and gas
groups led by the Independent Petroleum Association, including the North
Dakota Petroleum Council, in a letter to the Environmental Protection
Agency on Nov. 25, 2019.
But speaking a few months earlier, at the June 2019 meeting, Mr. Ness
appeared to contradict that argument. There is such a glut of natural
gas, he said, that some producers that drill primarily for oil have
little use for the gas that comes up with it. Yet “you’ve got to manage
your gas to produce your oil.”
The pushback against more stringent methane rules has been led by
smaller, independent producers who argued the rules were unfairly
burdensome for smaller drillers, because they could not afford to invest
in costly leak-detection and capture technology.
Oil giants like BP, on the other hand, urged the federal government to
keep methane regulations in place, saying it was “the right thing to do.”
Image
Ryan Flynn of the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association said that a chief
concern among young, female and Latino voters, when it comes to the
industry, “is always going to be environmental stewardship.”
Ryan Flynn of the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association said that a chief
concern among young, female and Latino voters, when it comes to the
industry, “is always going to be environmental stewardship.”
Credit...Susan Montoya Bryan/Associated Press
But ceding to the smaller operators’ demands, the Trump administration
has proposed to eliminate federal methane rules in a move that would
also reopen the question of whether the E.P.A. has the legal authority
to regulate methane as a pollutant. The weakening of the methane
standard is the latest in a long list of environmental-policy rollbacks
under President Trump, who has vowed to loosen regulations on industry.
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Continue reading the main story
At the Colorado meeting, executives also worried about a potential
backlash against the industry, particularly among younger voters. Recent
surveys have shown a sharp rise in the number of Americans who feel
passionately about climate change, and the issue appears likely to play
a more prominent role in this year’s presidential election than in
previous ones.
“Young voters, female voters, Hispanic voters, really every sector
except for older conservative male voters,” Ryan Flynn of the New Mexico
Oil and Gas Association said in the recording of the meeting, “their No.
1 issue when it comes to our industry is always going to be
environmental stewardship, and concerns about what we’re doing with the
environment.”
Dan Haley, president of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association, laid out
the stakes.
“Hippies were going to change the world, until they wanted to get a job
and buy a BMW,” Mr. Haley said in the meeting. “In Colorado, we’ve been
kind of playing a game of whack-a-mole. We went from where fracking was
the dirty word, and contaminated your water. And we inundated them with
information about that and blitzed the TV airwaves,” he said. “Then
slowly that changed into a health and safety messaging. And so we’re
ramping up our health and safety messaging.”
Climate change was “the prism through which everything is being viewed,”
Mr. Haley added. “We have to be comfortable talking about it, talking
about how we are part of the solution through natural gas. And again,
hitting people with emotions hitting them where they’re where their
heart is.”
“The activists are doing this when they talk about banning fracking in
Colorado. They don’t show explosions. They don’t show rigs. They show
women and children,” he said. “We have got to begin playing at that same
emotional level or we will not win these battles.”
Scott Prestidge, a spokesman for Mr. Haley, said it was difficult to
confirm the accuracy of a transcript from 2019, but said it was pretty
clear that the remarks about the hippies were “said tongue-in-cheek."
He added: “In Colorado, the men and women of this industry live and work
within the communities where oil and natural gas are being developed.
They care about clean air, clean water, and in protecting their family’s
safety and their community.”
In an interview, Mr. Flynn said that he had merely been expressing what
he described as widely held concerns about oil and gas’s effects on the
environment that he thought the industry needed to better address.
And he said attitudes toward regulations were changing, even among
smaller oil and gas producers. For instance, during the Obama
administration his organization opposed stronger federal methane
regulations. However, it did not back the more recent efforts to repeal
those rules.
“We absolutely need to address young people’s, all people’s, concerns
about climate change,” Mr. Flynn said. “We’ve taken criticism at times
from our peers that we are engaging on these issues,” he said. “But it’s
critical for the future of our industry.”
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