A federal rule written to curb the methane leaking from the nation’s oil and gas wells is being scrapped before it ever fully took effect.
President Donald Trump told a campaign rally in Lubbock, Texas, on Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2026, that his administration is “terminating” the Biden-era regulation aimed at cutting planet-warming methane emissions from oil and gas drilling. The change, he said, would unlock 210 million barrels of oil. That is equivalent to about 10 days of U.S. petroleum consumption.
“I’m officially terminating Biden’s expensive and unnecessary methane regulations to save consumers and energy producers $45 billion in costs,” Trump said at the rally, held for Texas Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton. The Biden plan, he said, “crushed the small operators.”
The move aims to encourage more domestic drilling as Trump faces criticism over high fuel prices amid the war in Iran.
Environmental groups said the rollback will let companies keep venting gas into the atmosphere that could instead be captured and used to power millions of households. “EPA should be fighting this waste, not making it easier,” said Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund.
“It will impose a heavier pollution burden on our front-line communities and make our energy sector less efficient,” said Max Lopez, an attorney with the Environmental Law & Policy Center.
The Program Zeldin Wants Gone
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin had already previewed the changes in September, saying they would eliminate the agency’s Super Emitter Program, which requires companies to investigate and repair major methane releases from oil and natural gas facilities. The EPA would also set less restrictive standards for small oil and gas wells.
Zeldin has put the price of the methane rule at $18 billion and said it was holding back the American energy industry. He said the Trump EPA is committed to fixing the problem so the country can reach its full energy potential.
Methane is responsible for about a third of planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, scientists estimate, and cutting it has emerged in recent years as a global priority for slowing climate change. Oil and gas operations are the largest industrial source of the gas, which is the main component of natural gas and far more potent to the atmosphere than carbon dioxide in the short term. It is invisible. It escapes from equipment, drifts into the air or is burned off as a waste byproduct during crude production.
A Rule That Never Took Effect
The regulation Trump is scrapping was unveiled by officials including former Vice President Kamala Harris at a 2023 U.N. climate conference in the United Arab Emirates. Federal officials under former President Joe Biden said it would prevent an estimated 58 million tons (52.6 million metric tonnes) of methane emissions by 2038 and reduce other pollutants tied to health problems. By 2034, they projected, it would deliver $98 billion in benefits — a figure built by calculating the future “social costs” of greenhouse gas emissions on public health and the environment, an approach Trump’s EPA rejects.
The final rule was published in 2024. It never went into full force. The EPA imposed an 18-month delay to give companies time to meet new inspection requirements and other provisions.
Its companion piece is already gone. The rule was written to work alongside a methane fee approved in the 2022 climate law, a “waste emissions charge” of as much as $1,500 per metric ton on energy producers that exceeded a set emissions level — the first time the federal government directly imposed a fee, or tax, on greenhouse gas emissions. Congress repealed it weeks after Trump took office.
The Wells That Leak the Most
The loosening arrives as Trump and congressional Republicans methodically take apart the climate policies enacted under Biden. That campaign has included revoking a scientific finding central to U.S. action on greenhouse gas emissions, lowering fuel economy standards for vehicles and moving to repeal emission limits for coal and natural gas power plants. Officials also tried to rein in methane from oil and gas under former President Barack Obama; that effort was scaled back during Trump’s first term.
What set the Biden rule apart was its reach. Earlier regulations covered only new oil and gas wells in the U.S.; this one regulated existing wells, and operators would have had to plug methane leaking from the smallest of them.
Those wells produce just 6% of the nation’s oil and gas. They account for up to half of all methane emissions from oil and gas fields.