Congress Voids the EPA's Methane Fee Rule. The Charge Stays in Statute, but It Has No Working Rule

On March 14, 2025, President Trump signed H.J. Res. 35, a resolution under the Congressional Review Act disapproving the Environmental Protection Agency's rule titled "Waste Emissions Charge for Petroleum and Natural Gas Systems: Procedures for Facilitating Compliance, Including Netting and Exemptions." The resolution became Public Law 119-2. Under the Congressional Review Act, a disapproved rule has no force or effect, and the agency may not reissue a rule that is substantially the same without new authorizing legislation.

The resolution passed the House in late February and the Senate shortly after, largely along party lines. The Inflation Reduction Act amended the Clean Air Act to add a charge on methane emissions from large oil and gas facilities that report to the EPA's Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program. The statute left it to the EPA to write the implementing details, including how to calculate a facility's charge, how companies could net emissions across facilities under common ownership, and how exemptions would work.

The Congressional Research Service has pointed out that the resolution struck the implementing rule, not the statutory requirement itself. The EPA had estimated in its rulemaking that the charge would raise revenue in the order of hundreds of millions of dollars a year in its early years, depending on how many facilities qualified for exemptions. For producers, the direct financial effect of the repeal is therefore concentrated among operators with older equipment, higher leak rates or high venting and flaring.

The new administration has said it will reconsider the methane standards and the reporting rules. The European Union's methane regulation, adopted in 2024, will require importers of oil, gas and coal to demonstrate that their supplies are subject to monitoring, reporting and verification standards equivalent to those in the EU. The United States is the largest supplier of LNG to the EU. Asian buyers, including in Japan and Korea, have also shown interest in methane intensity data for LNG cargoes, although their requirements are less formal than the EU's.

For investors, the repeal shifts methane from a federal compliance cost toward a commercial and reputational factor. Each of these is a separate process, and each affects a different part of the methane value chain.