Oil and Gas Companies Are Supporting Government Emissions Reporting—Just Not for the Reason We’d Hoped

4 min readThe good people at the National Security Archive have pried loose some fascinating documentation that concerns some double-entry bullshit regarding the government's efforts to gather data on greenhouse gases. Simply put, the extraction industries are trying to camouflage the data collection while simultaneously trying to save the institution that’s collecting the data.When the Trump administration announced plans last year to repeal the federal government’s greenhouse gas reporting system, rather than celebrate, many oil and gas companies publicly urged the EPA to preserve it. But for more than a year, behind closed doors, the fossil fuel industry has been pushing to weaken one of the reporting program’s most consequential elements. Oil and gas companies fear this Biden-era revision to the methane reporting rule, known as Subpart W, would force them to disclose much higher—and previously hidden—pollution levels. Those concerns, brewing for years, grew into a wave that ultimately would break onto the friendly shores of the Trump EPA in response to the agency’s expected overhaul of both the methane reporting rule and the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP), the most comprehensive system for tracking the nation's greenhouse gases, industry comments and public records show. New documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by the National Security Archive and shared with DeSmog detail [the] industry’s attempts to loosen federal methane pollution reporting requirements while simultaneously urging the U.S. government to preserve the GHGRP. This is the EPA’s overarching emissions monitoring system, which offers public data informing policy decisions, and currently is targeted by the Trump administration. The resulting regulatory changes could have major implications for helping the U.S. address the rapidly accelerating climate crisis, from the local to international level.“Oil and gas CEOs will always support weak rules they already comply with rather than no rules at all,” Edward Maibach, a climate change communication expert at George Mason University, said by email to the National Security Archive and DeSmog. “Supporting no rules at all would prove to everyone how untrustworthy they are.”The cynicism in this is almost mind-blowing. The heart of it seems to be the Biden administration's attempts to hold the oil and gas industries responsible for methane emissions, as methane is a heat-trapping gas far more potent than carbon dioxide.Methane, a heat-trapping pollutant more powerful than carbon dioxide in the short term, is the main component of natural gas. After carbon dioxide, methane accounts for the bulk of those facilities’ reported climate pollution. According to the EPA, the oil and gas industry is the largest source of methane emissions in the United States, and gas utilities appear particularly concerned about the future reporting and perception of these emissions. Although this methane monitoring rule has been around since 2010, in 2023 the Biden administration proposed key revisions that caused the fossil fuel industry to start worrying about a “major PR headache” and eventually lay the groundwork for defanging the rule once President Trump regained office. Finalized in 2024, those regulatory changes crucially altered the ways companies were required to estimate methane pollution by incorporating sources not previously covered by the program, such as super emitter events and equipment regulating natural gas pressure and flow.One of the monitoring rule’s stated goals is informing regulations to help address climate pollution—measure the problem, then understand how to fix it. For instance, emissions reported under the rule feed into a separate methane tax on companies discharging over a certain pollution threshold (although that regulation is currently delayed until 2034). This tax would affect many of the nation's low-producing marginal, or "stripper wells, which, recent studies show, generate around 6 percent of U.S. oil and gas output but roughly half of its methane emissions.Naturally, when the darkness fell over the government again in 2025, and the completely unqualified, failed politician Lee Zeldin was handed the keys to the DOGE-crippled EPA, methane rules were one of the first things to go. Zeldin proposed to completely vaporize the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP). Environmental groups howled, as they should have. But the oil and gas industries chimed in, asking that the GHGRP be reformed rather than eliminated entirely. Fox, meet henhouse.While most industry groups say they don’t want the program repealed, they did ask the EPA for more flexibility in estimating and measuring methane emissions. Last September, Zeldin delivered on this latter request: the EPA proposed a rule repealing the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program with eroded methane reporting requirements and delayed timelines until 2034. The EPA is expected to propose its final rule on the GHGRP any day. If finalized, it would exempt more than two-thirds of the roughly 8,000 industrial facilities, including power plants, steel mills, and refineries, from mandatory emissions reporting. The agency says it would save $303 million annually. A March study in the journal Nature found U.S. greenhouse gas emissions from 1990–2020 caused $3 trillion in damages to the nation, and another $7 trillion globally, figures expected to rise. Separately, the EPA is expected to propose a rule overhauling the current methane pollution disclosure requirements on the oil and gas industry. The oceans, we all should be reminded, don't care.