A new report by the Government Accountability Office says the Bureau of Land Management has yet to revise standards over natural gas, costing taxpayers.
The report notes the GAO had been urging the BLM — which oversees oil and gas development on federal and Indian lands — to update the standards in regards to venting and flaring natural gas since 2010, Autoblog says. The group found by doing so, up to 40 percent of the resource could be captured cheaply, then sold on the market.
However, the bureau is just now in the early process of updating those standards, leaving the taxpayers at “high-risk” for fraud and waste under its current resource management plan. Currently, this means the government is losing around $23 million on annual royalty payments, with more millions disappearing into the air since oil and gas production in the United States began booming in recent years.
Other issues in BLM’s management noted in the GAO report include failing to meet its annual goals for high-risk wells, and the venting of methane into the environment in an EPA-estimated amount equal to 3.1 million cars removed from the road or the closure of four coal-powered plants if the greenhouse gas had been captured instead.
In response, the bureau and its parent department, the U.S. Department of the Interior, agreed with the GAO’s findings, stating funding was the main reason for not being able to remedy the issues reported. The department said it was working to update the standards, adding that President Barack Obama was working on collecting fees from oil and gas companies in order to have the budget to inspect the high-risk wells.
[Photo credit: Tim Evanson/Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0]
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