Input Stories

The Biden administration is offering $850 million in federal funding to projects that monitor, measure and reduce oil and gas emissions (Law360, subscription).

What’s going on: “The grant money offered by the U.S. Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency, which comes from the Inflation Reduction Act, is aimed at getting technology in the hands of smaller oil and gas companies to track methane emissions from their operations, and speed up repairs of methane leaks from low-producing oil and gas wells and hard-to-mitigate equipment including gas compressors and gas-fired engines.”

• Funding will also be available for the installation of equipment to monitor and measure methane emissions in partnership with localities and for further tracking efforts “at the regional level.”

​​​​​​​The context: In December, the EPA and DOE conditionally awarded $350 million in formula grants to 14 states to aid oil and gas firms in cleaning up low-producing wells.

• That same month, the administration finalized broad methane-emissions rules, including the first standards for existing oil and gas infrastructure.
• And in May, the EPA finalized Inflation Reduction Act-mandated revisions to its Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, which assesses fees for any oil and gas company emissions that exceed a certain threshold.

However … “Republican-led states and oil and gas industry groups are challenging the rules in court.”