PHILADELPHIA — Melissa Ostroff finds gas leaks for a living, so it was surprising to hear someone say they smelled gas in her own home.
As part of her job with the environmental group Earthworks, Ostroff searches gas drilling and production sites in Pennsylvania for plumes of methane, a big driver of climate change. A few years back, her family visited her south Philadelphia row home for the holidays.
"When my sister entered the house, she told me she smelled gas," Ostroff says. Knowing that gas utility meters are a big source of leaks, that was the first place she examined with a device she uses for her job. "There was a small but very continuous leak coming from a pipe fitting around the gas meter."
Ostroff figures she had become accustomed to the odorant gas companies put in natural gas so customers will detect leaks. She called her utility, which fixed it right away. Aside from the safety concern, Ostroff knows that gas leaks are a problem for the climate. Methane is the main component of natural gas and, as one of the greenhouse gasses heating the planet, it is 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
Now, under proposed federal regulations, gas utilities would have to find and fix more leaks like this. At the end of his first term in office, President-elect Donald Trump signed an appropriations bill that included the new requirement. The Biden administration is finishing the rules to implement the law. In the past, utilities focused this work on safety and preventing explosions that hurt people and damage property. Under the new rules, they'll also have to consider environmental harm when searching for methane leaks.
A solution for the methane problem
You can't see methane, but a special infrared camera can. These costs thousands of dollars. Ostroff had one in her home because that's what she uses to find plumes at drilling sites. Now, she periodically checks the meter for leaks and says the problem appears to be fixed.
Customer gas meters are the largest source of methane that escapes in the atmosphere. But leaks like this are not common. An industry study from GTI Energy showed less than 1% of indoor meters leak. But there are a lot of meters in the country, and it's easy to find customers online who say they've experienced leaks. Outdoor meters are less of a risk for causing explosions because the methane disperses into the atmosphere. But there, methane becomes a problem for the climate.
The new gas leak rules have been drafted by federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), which regulates gas utility pipelines and other infrastructure, all the way up to and including customer meters. Because safety was the focus in the past, utilities detected some leaks, but they didn't reach the top of the repair list for years.
"I've found like 10-year-old leaks," says Erin Murphy, an attorney with the Environmental Defense Fund. "So they've known about this pipeline leak for 10 years and haven't fixed it because they're not required to."
PHMSA's proposed regulations that apply to gas meters are part of a larger group of regulations intended to reduce methane pollution from natural gas pipelines. The new rules are not as strict as Murphy would like, but she says they're an improvement.
"In the proposed rule, PHMSA would require operators to conduct more frequent leak surveys, to use more advanced technologies in those surveys, and to fix the leaks that they find more quickly," Murphy says.
Gas utilities say they already were reducing methane pollution. Their main trade group, American Gas Association (AGA), says methane emissions from utilities are down 70% since 1990. Still, they say they are generally supportive of PHMSA's proposed rules and the law requiring them.
"It makes a heck of a lot of sense for us to codify something that, frankly, we're all kind of doing already," says Erin Kurilla, executive vice president at the American Public Gas Association (APGA), which represents publicly owned utilities.
The APGA, AGA and related trade associations filed 77 pages of comments and suggestions on the proposed rule, but Kurilla characterizes most of the areas of contention as "paperwork provisions."
"We like where PHMSA is headed. We think methane reduction is important," says Lloyd Yates, president and CEO of the Indiana-based utility company NiSource. He also chairs AGA's board of directors. He does have questions about how much the new regulations will cost. "As you try and drive methane down, you spend more money on that and you got to do this in a way that's affordable for customers."
Given this general support from the industry, most people interviewed for this story don't expect big changes to these regulations from the incoming Trump administration, which didn't respond to a request for comment. The rules could be finalized as early as next month.
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