BP response to Financial Times article on methane regulation

The Financial Times today published an article on BP’s stance on the regulation of methane emissions. BP does not believe the article reflects its commitment to tackling methane emissions nor the extensive actions it is taking across its business. The full statement, below, was provided to the FT before the piece was published.

• Natural gas has a critical role to play in helping the world transition to a low-carbon future, but it can only play its part if we control methane emissions.
• BP has long supported well-designed regulations that complement voluntary efforts by companies to address this challenge.
• We have consistently advocated for regulation of methane emissions by one federal agency – the Environmental Protection Agency—rather than an inefficient patchwork of different federal or state agencies.
• Thus, we suggested that the duplicative methane regulations by the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management should be repealed and the EPA regulations should be kept in place but improved.
• We believe the EPA regulation should be flexible enough to allow for a range of technologies rather than rigidly bound to current tools that may become obsolete tomorrow.
• In short, BP supports the EPA directly regulating methane emissions through well-designed, cost-effective and technologically-flexible rules.
• But BP is not waiting for perfect regulations. We’re driving down methane emissions throughout our business.
• Last year BP announced an industry-leading methane intensity target of 0.2% -- a target praised by the Environmental Defense Fund and others for its stringency – and we are holding emissions to that goal.
• In our U.S. onshore operations, we have replaced around 99 percent of our high-bleed pneumatic controllers with continuous low-bleed and intermittent pneumatic controllers, and are deploying drones and other new remote leak-detection technologies.
• We’re also sharing lessons learned with industry and others through a series of methane roundtable events we’ve hosted in London, Washington, Beijing, and next month Brussels.
• BP is a founding member of the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, which brings together 13 of the world’s largest energy companies and has set up a $1 billion investment fund to address methane emissions and other issues.
• BP is also a signatory member of the Methane Guiding Principles and within it we’re leading development of a plan to accelerate implementation of best practice guidelines across the natural gas value chain.
• BP will continue to advocate for well-designed, cost-effective federal methane regulations that can help us control emissions and advance a low-carbon future.