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This program will highlight what you need to know about how these new rules intersect, new compliance and enforcement risks, and how to plan now for operations and upcoming transactions.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has published a proposed rule to assess and collect billions of dollars in methane “waste emission charges” from the oil and gas sector.

ExxonMobil (“Exxon”) filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas on Sunday, January 21, 2024, seeking a declaratory judgment to exclude a shareholder proposal from its proxy statement pursuant to Rule 14a-8 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (“Rule 14a-8”) and not present the proposal for a vote at its 2024 annual shareholder meeting.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (“EPA”) supplemental proposal for regulating methane and volatile organic compound emissions from the oil and gas sector is coming in October, according to the EPA’s latest semiannual regulatory agenda.

On Sunday, August 7 the Senate passed the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (the Act) as part of the FY 2022 Budget Reconciliation bill.

The Supreme Court ended its 2021 term with a much-anticipated decision in West Virginia v. EPA.

On February 15, 2022, the Biden administration announced a slew of low carbon emissions initiatives for the industrial sector in support of the administration’s goal to achieve a net-zero economy.

EPA has received more than 300,000 comments on its November 2021 proposal to regulate methane from new and existing sources in the oil and gas production sector.

On November 15, 2021, the Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) published a proposed rule that included three separate actions under the Clean Air Act that target new and existing air emission sources at oil and natural gas well sites, natural gas gathering and boosting compressor stations, natural gas processing plants, and transmission and storage facilities.

On June 30, 2021, President Biden signed into law a joint resolution of Congress repealing a Trump administration rule that removed methane as a pollutant regulated under the Clean Air Act in the oil and gas industry.

On April 6, 2021, more than 400 environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) submitted to EPA a “Petition for Rulemaking to Remove Methane and Ethane from ‘Negligibly Reactive’ Volatile Organic Compounds List.”

As discussed in this previous post, the state of methane regulation for the oil and gas industry has been in flux over the past few years as federal regulations issued by the Obama administration were challenged in court and then altered by the Trump administration.