The Environmental Protection Agency announced on Wednesday that it would delay a requirement that the oil and gas industry limit emissions of methane, a powerful planet-warming gas.
Under the requirement, which dates to the Biden administration, oil and gas companies were supposed to start this year reducing the amount of methane they release into the atmosphere. Instead, the Trump administration is giving them until January 2027 and is considering repealing the measure altogether.
The move dealt a blow to any remaining effort by the United States to slow Earth’s dangerous warming. It came after the Trump administration boycotted the United Nations climate summit this month, the first time that the United States was not present since the annual meetings began 30 years ago.
Under President Trump, the E.P.A. is also working to erase the government’s legal authority to limit greenhouse gas emissions from car tailpipes and power plant smokestacks. Those rollbacks could be completed in the coming months.
Methane is considered a “super pollutant” because, while it breaks down more quickly than carbon dioxide, it traps about 80 times as much heat in the atmosphere in the short term. It is responsible for nearly a third of the rise in global temperatures since the start of the Industrial Revolution.
Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, said the delay would save oil and gas companies an estimated $750 million over 11 years in compliance costs.
“The previous administration used oil and gas standards as a weapon to shut down development and manufacturing in the United States,” Mr. Zeldin said in a statement. “By finalizing compliance extensions, E.P.A. is ensuring unrealistic regulations do not prevent America from unleashing energy dominance.”
Under the Biden administration, the United States produced record amounts of oil and natural gas.
The oil and gas industry ranks as the largest industrial source of methane emissions in the country. The gas can leak from wells, pipelines, storage tanks and other fossil fuel infrastructure. Often, companies intentionally vent methane from their operations in a process known as flaring. The gas can also come from natural sources such as agricultural fields and wetlands.
Experts have said reducing methane leaks is one of the fastest and most effective ways to make a dent in global warming.
Yet emissions of methane, the main ingredient in natural gas, have risen sharply in the United States in recent years. By the Trump administration’s own estimates, delaying compliance could result in an additional 3.8 million tons of methane entering the atmosphere, the equivalent of adding nearly 25 million gas-powered cars to the nation’s roads.
“This delay risks the health of millions of Americans living near oil and gas production, and undermines progress by industry leaders,” Rosalie Winn, the senior director for methane at the Environmental Defense Fund, a nonprofit advocacy group, said in a statement.
The Biden administration initially sought to rein in methane as part of a goal, now abandoned by Mr. Trump, to cut U.S. emissions roughly in half by 2035. It finalized a regulation in 2023 requiring oil and gas operators to fix equipment leaking methane and to curb the venting of excess natural gas.
Mr. Zeldin has indicated that he is considering fully repealing the regulation, which he has claimed is “throttling the oil and gas industry.” But some in the industry have called for keeping the rule in place, noting that they have already invested in expensive technologies to monitor and capture methane.
The American Petroleum Institute, the main trade group for the U.S. oil and gas industry, said it supported the delay.
“Smart regulations are essential to sustaining our industry’s progress in reducing methane emissions,” Charlotte Law, a spokeswoman for the group, said in an email on Wednesday. “We commend E.P.A. for its thoughtful and timely work to finalize a rule that supports innovation while balancing environmental progress and meeting the world’s growing energy needs.”
The E.P.A. first announced in July that it planned to delay compliance with the methane rule. The agency finalized the delay late on Wednesday afternoon, continuing a tradition of administrations from both parties announcing environmental news around Thanksgiving.
On the day after Thanksgiving in 2018, the first Trump administration made public the fourth National Climate Assessment, which presented stark warnings about the dangers of climate change. Critics said at the time that the administration was trying to bury that news by releasing it on Black Friday, which traditionally kicks off the holiday shopping season. And, on that day in 2021, the Biden administration unveiled plans to make oil and gas companies pay more to drill on federal lands and waters.
Lisa Friedman is a Times reporter who writes about how governments are addressing climate change and the effects of those policies on communities.
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