National Sea Grant College Program Amendments Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. BARRASSO. Mr. President, last week the Prime Minister of Canada came for a visit. President Obama used that opportunity to take yet another cheap shot at American energy producers. The administration has made a deal with Canada to cut methane emissions from oil and gas production facilities.

They want tough new restrictions to cut emissions almost in half over the next decade. The very same day, the Environmental Protection Agency said that it plans to come up with more regulations for methane.

The Obama administration is already trying to limit the methane that gets released from new oil and gas wells as they get put into production. Now the administration wants to go back and impose those limits on existing wells--ones that were built to actually comply with the current rules on the books.

Here is what I find most interesting about this. This was an official state visit by a foreign leader to the United States. It was the first trip for the new Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau. So President Obama decided that the most important thing the two countries could talk about was methane--not Syria, not trying to stop radical Islamist terrorists, not dealing with ISIS, not the hostile regimes of North Korea, Iran, or Russia, not what we could do to actually help our economies grow--no. Instead, President Obama chose to focus on methane.

Why is President Obama so fixated on this? Let me tell you. The President is bitter--bitter that the Supreme Court is blocking his Clean Power Plan. He is pouting and he is pandering. He has gone after coal, he has gone after oil, and now he is going after natural gas. It is a vendetta against American energy producers.

The President and other Democrats are pandering to radical environmental extremists and to their billionaire donors.

We all want to make sure that we have a clean environment. My goal is to make American energy as clean as we can, as fast as we can, and to do it in ways that don't raise costs for American families. That is why the people I talk with in Wyoming believe that this new regulation is the wrong approach.

My local newspaper, the Casper Star Tribune, had a front-page article about it on Friday. The headline was this: ``Cuts to methane emissions proposed.'' The article quotes John Robitaille. He is from the Petroleum Association of Wyoming. He says the Environmental Protection Agency ``has failed to recognize the economic burden placed on replacing equipment on existing wells as opposed to new wells''--ones that are still to be built.

John Robitaille may say ``failed to recognize.'' I say the administration deliberately refuses to recognize--refuses. For Washington to come in and demand expensive new equipment for all of these oil and gas wells would be a huge cost. It would drive up prices for consumers, and it would mean that some of these wells wouldn't be economically worthwhile anymore. The oil and gas would stay in the ground where it does nothing to help power our economy or power our country.

States are already doing their part. States are trying to limit methane leaks where they find a problem. Colorado has a leak detection and repair program that will help keep ozone and methane from escaping. Wyoming, my home State, is looking for ways to get more up-to-date equipment on new wells as they get going.

So the States are already taking the lead, and they are already coming up with solutions where they are needed. This is not a one-size- fits-all regulation coming from unelected, unaccountable Washington bureaucrats. But that is what we are having to deal with now in this administration.

What we prefer are State solutions. What I just described are State solutions that strike a commonsense balance between a strong economy and a very healthy environment. It is not just the States that are taking action. Oil and gas producers also want to reduce how much methane escapes from these wells.

When you think about it, producers would prefer to capture that gas and then to sell it so it can be used. That is why the industry reduced methane emissions by 13 percent between 2008 and 2013. Over the same years, U.S. shale gas production grew by 400 percent. So the industry actually cut emissions even while gas production went way up. This happened because of the action that the producers in the States have already been taking, not because of more regulations coming out of Washington, DC. Energy producers need the flexibility to tackle these emissions when and how it makes sense.

There are already too many rules on the books. The Bureau of Land Management has another methane rule in the works. More duplicative regulations will just raise costs for Americans at a time when our economy is weak and emissions actually are already dropping.

This new redtape could add hundreds of millions of dollars every year onto the cost of producing American red, white, and blue energy. If the Obama administration really wants to reduce emissions from oil and gas wells, it should help the industry to capture this gas and to use it.

This was the subject of bipartisan legislation that Senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota and I offered last month. It was an amendment to the energy legislation. Our bipartisan amendment would have expedited the permit process for natural gas gathering lines--the lines that gather this gas on the Federal land, on Indian land and then help take it to market.

Gas gathering lines are essentially pipelines that collect unprocessed gas from oil and gas wells and then ship it to a processing plant. At the plant, different kinds of gases--methane, propane--are separated from one another. They are then shipped out again to locations where they can be sold and used by people.

That is what the producers want to do. The problem is that we don't have enough of these pipelines now to gather up the gas and to send it to the processing plants. A lot of times there is only one option if you don't have the gathering lines, and that is to flare or vent the excess natural gas at the well. If there were more gathering lines, we would have a lot less waste of energy. We would have a lot less of these methane emissions that President Obama claims to be so worried about. So Senator Heitkamp and I offered a better way to deal with the problem, and 43 Democrats here in the Senate blocked our amendment.

At a hearing of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee last month, I actually asked Interior Secretary Jewell about the idea. Even she had to concede that speeding up the permits was something that they should be looking into.

This doesn't have to be a fight. We all agree there is too much of this gas that has been vented or burned off at the oil and gas wells. Republicans know it. Democrats know it. Energy producers know it. So why can't we agree to let the industry build the gathering lines to help them capture the gas where it makes sense and how it makes sense? Why do we need more Washington regulations that impose higher costs?

America's energy producers have increased production while reducing emissions. They have provided what may be the only bright spot in our economy over the past 7 years. We should be doing all that we can to help and to encourage them. We should be looking for voluntary, cost- effective ways to make sure that we can make American energy as clean as we can and as fast as we can without raising costs on American families. The Obama administration is going in the wrong direction.

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