The Trump administration has already delayed implementation of the critical standards for year+

Washington, DC — Last night during a rally in Texas, Donald Trump announced that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency would roll back safeguards finalized in 2024 to limit methane pollution from the oil and gas sector. This dangerous reversal—revealed earlier this month by Administrator Lee Zeldin—would allow bad-actor corporations to release more climate-disrupting compounds and other pollutants into our atmosphere, jeopardizing the health and wellbeing of our families and communities.

In 2024, the Biden Administration issued landmark methane standards for the oil and gas sector that significantly reduce these and other pollutants from both new and existing equipment. These safeguards are based on low-cost, commonsense practices and technologies that have been available to oil and gas operators for years or even decades. For instance, the standards require operators to capture or use gas at oil wells rather than flare it; to conduct regular inspections to identify and fix leaking equipment at well sites and compressor stations; and to use zero-emitting electric pumps and process controllers rather than gas-powered devices.

Soon after taking office in 2025, the Trump EPA suspended the implementation of key provisions from the Biden-era standards, delaying their enforcement by up to 18 months despite no widespread evidence of compliance difficulties. Now, the EPA is preparing a proposal that would permanently eliminate some of the rule’s most important safeguards, including its ban on routine flaring at oil wells and its program to leverage third-party monitoring data to identify and stop particularly large methane releases known as super-emitter events.

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