Exporting natural gas just got easier.

This afternoon, the Department of Energy approved the second application for a facility to export liquefied natural gas (LNG) worldwide. Today’s approval to export up to 1.4 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day goes to Freeport LNG Expansion, on Quintana Island in Texas, for 25 years. The approval process now moves to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commissions (FERC), so the company is not in the clear yet.

Several companies have received nearly two dozen permits from DoE to export LNG to countries with which the U.S. has a free trade agreement (FTA), but the approval process has been much slower for permits to export to non-FTA countries. 19 facilities that want to export LNG to non-FTA countries are still under review by the Energy Department — including a joint project between ExxonMobil and Qatar Petroleum.

The natural gas industry is booming in the United States, largely due to the practice of fracking, which opened up large parts of the country to extraction previously thought uneconomical to drill. Natural gas can be transported via pipeline across land, but when companies want to export the fuel overseas, they have to use ships. Since natural gas (mostly methane) in gas form would require a large ship to transport, it must be cooled and liquefied before it can be exported across an ocean.

In the last decade, companies built facilities to import natural gas because the U.S. expected lower production than what fracking actually allowed. Once the shale gas boom sharply increased domestic production, they have tried to turn those import terminals into export terminals. Cheniere Energy’s Sabine Pass terminal, the first facility to receive DoE approval to export to non-FTA countries, is one example of this.

The reason for the delay of such applications is due to opposition largely from the chemical industry, which fears that exports will lead to an increase in the price of natural gas (which it uses for industrial purposes), and those who care about carbon emissions and the environment, who point out that the U.S. still does not know the consequences that exports will have on carbon emissions.

Congressman Ed Markey, running for John Kerry’s old senate seat in Massachusetts, said today that “The Department of Energy still doesn’t even know what the impact of natural gas exports will be on domestic businesses and consumers, but they are approving more exports anyway.”

If the U.S. is increasing exports, it becomes even more critical to ensure that the natural gas obtained through hydraulic fracturing is as safe as possible, with zero fugitive emissions. Yesterday the Interior Department released draft fracking rules, and there are some easy ways (5 in fact) to make the rules adequately protect Americans and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It is one thing to argue for weak safeguards to give Americans access to “cheap energy” — it is another to argue for weak rules that poison the air and water to export the energy to other countries.

The net climate effects of LNG exports depend largely on the energy currently used by the importing country — what the gas will replace. Coal-heavy economies that replace their coal with natural gas should see lower emissions, but this transition could threaten more valuable transitions to renewable energy.

The Energy Department said in today’s approval that “the exports proposed in this Application are likely to yield net economic benefits to the United States.” Left unsaid is the fact that the more fossil fuels left in the ground, the easier it is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which would benefit the economy in myriad ways.

Last year I explained why “Exporting Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) Is Bad For The Climate — And A Very Poor Long-Term Investment.” It seems like Obama plans to press ahead with expanding LNG exports. So here’s a view from World Resources Institute.

By James Bradbury

U.S. natural gas production is booming. According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), production grew by 23 percentfrom 2007 to 2012. Now—with production projected to continue growing in the decades ahead—U.S. lawmakers and companies are considering exporting this resource internationally. But what are the climate implications of doing so?

This is a topic I sought to address in my testimony yesterday before the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy and Power. The hearing, “U.S. Energy Abundance: Exports and the Changing Global Energy Landscape,” examined both the opportunities and risks presented by exporting liquefied natural gas (LNG). I sought to emphasize a number of points that are often overlooked in this discussion; in particular,fugitive methane emissions and cost-effective options for reducing them.

Environmental Impacts of Natural Gas Production

While burning natural gas releases half the amount of carbon dioxide as coal, producing the fuel comes with considerable environmental risks (see: here, here, and here). We’re already seeing these risks play out domestically. In addition to habitat disruption and impacts on local air and water quality, one of the most significant implications of natural gas production is fugitive methane emissions.

Methane is the primary component of natural gas. It escapes into the air as “fugitive methane emissions” along every stage of the natural gas production process.

The estimated leakage rate for natural gas systems was only about 1.4 percent of total production in 2011, according to the most recent greenhouse gas inventory. While this may not sound like much, it contributes significantly to climate change because methane is a potent greenhouse gas—at least 25 times stronger than carbon dioxide. In fact, this fugitive methaneamounts to more greenhouse gas emissions than all of the direct and indirect emissions from U.S. iron and steel, cement, and aluminum manufacturing combined. There is much need–and opportunity–for reducing these emissions.

Natural Gas Exports and Greenhouse Gas Emissions

The EIA projects that the United States will begin exporting LNG within the next five years, and that the country will become a net exporter by 2020. Exporting LNG may exacerbate the fugitive methane problem along with other environmental issues. Exporting natural gas raises three primary concerns from a climate change perspective:

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Republican members of the House Natural Resources Committee will do their level best at a hearing today to perpetuate a host of myths about the pace and efficiency of oil and gas development on federal lands compared to state and private lands. And as in the past, their level best won’t be on the level.

Today’s hearing, “State Lands vs. Federal Lands Oil and Gas Production: What State Regulators Are Doing Right,” is the latest attempt to show that the Obama administration, through regulations, bureaucratic obstacles, and an ideological hostility to the oil and gas industry, has thwarted traditional energy development on 700 million acres of federal and tribal lands and those private lands where it controls the mineral rights.

Those criticisms fly in the face of the facts:

• Oil production from federal lands and waters in every one of the last four years was higher than it was in 2008, according to an analysis of Energy Information Administration data by the Congressional Research Service.
• The oil and gas industry itself has cut back on its requests to drill on public lands, from an average of 6.6 million acres in 2006 to 2008 to 4.8 million acres annually from 2009 to 2012, a decline of 27 percent.
• The production of shale gas and shale oil in recent years is taking place “largely outside of the Federal lands” because that’s where those resources are, according to 2012 testimony by Adam Sieminski, administrator of the Energy Information Administration to the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
• The vast majority of shale oil and shale gas plays exist underneath non-federal lands, a study by the Center for Western Priorities found. That study, “Follow the Oil,” showed that only ten percent of shale gas plays occur on federal lands, and only 7 percent of shale oil and mixed plays are on federal lands.
• High oil prices Market forces and depressed natural gas prices have been driving oil and gas developers to shift from drilling for natural gas to drilling for shale oil in places like North Dakota, where the resources largely lie beneath private lands. Oil and gas companies have made “market choices…to shift their production to oil and other liquid plays and away from gas,” according to Mark Squillace, professor of law at the University of Colorado. “And this means less activity on public lands.”
• State and federal permitting procedures for oil and gas are fundamentally different, with negotiations to resolve problems taking place before permitting begins on private land but after the process begins on federal land, making it almost automatically faster to get permits on lands where the state controls the permitting. As the Congressional Research Service reported, “A private versus federal permitting regime does not lend itself to an ‘apples to apples’ comparison.”
• The Congressional Research Service also found that between 2006 and 2011 the federal Bureau of Land Management has significantly cut its time for processing drilling permits from an average of 127 days to 71 days, while the time it has taken for industry to complete its processing chores has increased from an average of 91 days to 236 days.

Many critics of the federal oil and gas leasing program ignore that these resources are on publicly owned lands and waters — they belong to every American. And as the Federal Land Policy and Management Act makes clear, these lands are for multiple uses — including hunting, fishing, recreation, and grazing — and not just for oil and gas production. Despite this multiple use management requirement, the president has leased 2 acres for oil and gas production for every one acre of land conserved for future generations.

Members of the House Natural Resources Committee should be more concerned about that imbalance, rather than their fictitious statements about oil and gas production from federal lands and waters by President Obama.

Tom Kenworthy is a Senior Fellow with the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Daniel J. Weiss is a Senior Fellow and the Director of Climate Strategy at the Center for American Progress.

By Bill Becker (Part 1 can be found here)

With debate over the Keystone XL pipeline heating up, the White House has issued an update of President Obama’s “Blueprint for a Clean and Secure Energy Future“. It is the latest of White House policy pronouncements that leave us wondering whether President Obama will ever uncage his inner revolutionary to fight for genuine energy security.

At this point, it’s anyone’s guess. The blueprint’s content does not live up to the promise of its title. It contains stark contradictions. It sticks to Obama’s all-of-the-above energy strategy – a strategy transparently designed to keep all-of-the-above special interests happy. Because it supports all types of energy — including the fossil fuels responsible for global climate change — it advocates nothing.

Consider:

Oil Production: The President’s energy blueprint acknowledges that “rising gas prices serve as a reminder that we are still too reliant on oil, which comes at a cost to American families and businesses.” It “urges Congress to take up common-sense proposals that will further reduce our dependence on oil”.

At the same time, it boasts that since President Obama took office, “responsible oil and gas production has increased each year” in the United States. “Under my administration, America is producing more oil today than at any time in the last eight years,” the President said last year. “Over the last three years, I’ve directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different states. We’re opening up more than 75% of our potential oil resources offshore. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high.”
If we are too dependent on oil, why is the President so bullish on producing more?

Energy Research: At a time the United States is under-investing in renewable energy R&D, the President’s new budget proposes $375 million for research on “cleaner energy from fossil fuels” including “more responsible” natural gas production and more funding for “clean coal” technology and carbon capture and storage.

While some fossil fuels are dirtier than others, none are clean. They all emit greenhouse gases when they are burned. They all involve environmental disruption when they are extracted. The cleanest of the fuels from a carbon standpoint, natural gas, has been accused of contaminating groundwater and leaking so much methane that it could be a bigger contributor to climate change than coal.

Meantime, clean energy is all around us but greatly underused. As others have pointed out, the greatest power plant ever created gives us free energy with no pollution, delivers it everywhere within seconds from 93 million miles away and won’t run out of fuel for 7 billion years. Rather than harvesting energy from the sun, why are we still trying so hard to dig it up from underground?

Corporate Welfare: To his credit, President Obama has urged Congress to repeal billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies for the oil industry. But from the standpoint of an effective market, providing taxpayer money for research on “cleaner energy from fossil fuels” is no better. The coal, gas and oil industries are all grown up now and making pretty good livings. Most other businesses have to do their own R&D to remain relevant in a changing market. Why shouldn’t the fossil industries?

As for natural gas, why should taxpayers foot the bill to help the industry be more responsible? If gas companies don’t adopt more responsible production practices voluntarily, the government’s job is not to write them a check; it’s to implement regulations that protect the public. That’s what EPA is trying to do with the standards it announced last year to control methane and other air pollutants from oil and gas operations.

In the meantime gas companies aren’t showing a lot of interest in responsible production; instead they seem to be fracking and drilling as fast as they can before regulations can take effect.

Making Our Own Drug: The International Energy Agency predicts that fracking and horizontal drilling will make the United States the world’s largest oil producer sometime around 2017, surpassing even Saudi Arabia.

That would be a welcome change from nearly a half-century of dependence on foreign oil. But it also would make us the world’s biggest producer of one of the products most responsible for global climate disruption. Is that the title we want? Or, as the nation responsible for most of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere today, shouldn’t we set a more moral example as the nation that leads the world to a low-carbon economy?

Shouldn’t we at least have a national energy plan that defines how and when we’ll end our dependence on oil, foreign or domestic- a downramp that signals our commitment to other nations and gives financial markets an incentive to capitalize our transition to clean energy?

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Residents of Washington, DC are used to jokes about metaphorical hot air, humidity, and the swampy history of their city. But there’s something they may not know about the District: it’s overrun with methane, which sometimes makes manhole covers explode.

Natural gas is mostly methane, and it is carried through underground pipes to heat buildings and cook food. Those pipes are often old, and this led ecologist and chemical engineer Robert Jackson of Duke University to drive around DC over a period of two months, regularly measuring the air to take methane levels.

He and his research team found methane leaks everywhere, with thousands of places having significantly higher than normal methane concentrations, and some places reaching 50 times normal urban levels (100 ppm vs 2 ppm). A similar study in Boston last year found essentially the same results. In DC, the source wasn’t the swamp on which the city was built — it was fossil fuel. (The methane they measured had more carbon-13 rather than the normal, modern carbon-12.)

Methane leaks mapped as 3,356 spikes along 785 miles of road in Boston. Yellow indicates methane levels above 2.5 parts per million.

There are sources of methane all over the planet: landfills, swamps, rice paddies, gas wells, melting permafrost, and livestock all contribute. Jackson’s research found another major source: aging infrastructure. Methane isn’t immediately physically harmful, though it does lead to ground-level ozone which is known to harm tree growth and reduce lung function

But what about the exploding manholes? Science Now explains:

Even more disturbing than the thousands of large leaks on the street were the levels of methane in manholes. In some, the researchers found levels as high as 100,000 ppm. Natural gas companies typically consider 40000 ppm to be the threshold for a risk of explosion. D.C. manholes have a tendency to blow up — there are an average of 38 “manhole incidents” per year in the district, according to a report by Stone & Webster Consultants in Boston, including one yesterday on 33rd Street in Georgetown that forced the evacuation of a cupcake shop. Although Jackson cannot say for certain that leaking natural gas is the reason for these blasts, the leaks certainly don’t contribute to safety.

What usually happens is a spark from an exposed cable sets off an explosion of pressurized gas — what remains unclear is how much of this gas is methane. DC’s utility, Pepco, investigated a manhole explosion in 2000 and though their press release ruled out natural gas, their report to the DC Public Service Commission indicated otherwise, according to a February 26, 2000 article in the Washington Post.

Pepco issued a report to the D.C. Public Service Commission yesterday that strongly indicated a natural gas leak may have led to the fire and explosions last week that blew three manhole covers in Georgetown, an incident that shut down the 3100 block of M Street NW for 24 hours.

“We may never know what gas caused the fire — whether it’s sewer gas, gas emitted by burning rubber cable or natural gas,” said Nancy Moses, a spokeswoman for Potomac Electric Power Co. But the report said sewer gas “has historically not been a significant problem in [Pepco] manholes” and “the strength and location of the manhole explosions . . . raises questions as to whether the explosion could have been caused solely by gasses [caused] by burning of low voltage cable insulation.”

Tim Sargeant, a spokesman for Washington Gas, said yesterday that the utility was “disappointed that Pepco speculation and finger-pointing would continue. The report is more innuendo than investigation.”

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A 2011 magnitude 5.7 quake in OK, linked to wastewater injection, buckled US Highway 62. (Credit: John Leeman)

After pulling massive amounts of fossil fuels out of the Earth’s crust so we can burn it up into our atmosphere, we have a good sense of where the stuff goes. Our oceans. A global greenhouse. Our lungs. But what happens to the ground formerly occupied by those fossil fuels?

It’s becoming increasingly clear that oil and gas extraction processes are actually weakening the structural integrity of the Earth’s crust just enough to cause more frequent earthquakes, in places not used to them.

Oklahoma, for instance, is not known for earthquakes. Yet the central U.S. has seen an elevenfold jump in recent years, including the Sooner State’s largest earthquake on record. This 5.7-magnitude quake occurred on November 6, 2011 near Prague, Oklahoma. And research published yesterday in Geology from the University of Oklahoma, Columbia University, and the U.S. Geological Survey has made a direct connection to the disposal of wastewater from conventional oil production:

A new study in the journal Geology is the latest to tie a string of unusual earthquakes, in this case, in central Oklahoma, to the injection of wastewater deep underground. Researchers now say that the magnitude 5.7 earthquake near Prague, Okla., on Nov. 6, 2011, may also be the largest ever linked to wastewater injection. Felt as far away as Milwaukee, more than 800 miles away, the quake — the biggest ever recorded in Oklahoma — destroyed 14 homes, buckled a federal highway and left two people injured. Small earthquakes continue to be recorded in the area.

The recent boom in U.S. energy production has produced massive amounts of wastewater. The water is used both in hydrofracking, which cracks open rocks to release natural gas, and in coaxing petroleum out of conventional oil wells. In both cases, the brine and chemical-laced water has to be disposed of, often by injecting it back underground elsewhere, where it has the potential to trigger earthquakes. The water linked to the Prague quakes was a byproduct of oil extraction at one set of oil wells, and was pumped into another set of depleted oil wells targeted for waste storage.

As Climate Progress has written before, this practice of disposing chemical-laced water generated during the extraction of oil and gas has far-reaching effects. Drillers have been doing this for more than a decade, and the researchers note that the Oklahoma quake did not actually require very much wastewater. In fact, because we have been doing this for so long, the built-up pressure in the Earth’s crust changes the criteria of how quakes happen. The study’s abstract notes:

Significantly, this case indicates that decades-long lags between the commencement of fluid injection and the onset of induced earthquakes are possible, and modifies our common criteria for fluid-induced events.

So we could be paying for more than a decade of wastewater injection and fracking for quite some time with earthquakes. There’s not much more room 9,000 feet down. Wellhead records indicate that pressure in these areas underground increased by a factor of ten from 2001 to 2006.

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Twice a year, a group of experts release a ranked list of the world’s most powerful computers called TOP500. It is likely that the new list in June will have a new member of the Top 10 of the Top 500: a computer dubbed Pangea. Its output is is 2.3 petaflops. A petaflop is a quadrillion “floating-point operations per second.” Today’s desktop computers deal in gigaflops, or billions.

The system is the fastest commercially-owned computer in the world. The other faster computers on TOP500′s list are owned by governments or academic institutions and therefore used for research.

Pangea is owned by Total SA, the fifth-largest oil and gas company in the world. So the supercomputer will not be changing the future of health care IT like former Jeopardy champion Watson or revolutionizing climate projections and weather research like supercomputers at NCAR and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It will be searching for oil and gas, according to Reuters.

Pangea helped analyze seismic data from Total’s Kaombo project in Angola in just nine days, instead of the four and a half months it would have taken with its previous computer, Philippe Malzac, IT director at Total’s Exploration division, told Reuters:

Total trumps British rival BP with the 2.3-petaflop supercomputer. BP said last December it was building a 2 petaflop supercomputing facility in Houston, Texas.

“Our competitors are also working on these kind of algorithms, but we think this is giving us a head start,” Malzac said.

The price of the system is undisclosed, but it will cost nearly $20 million per year just to run Pangea. The technological achievement may be impressive, but the reality is that oil and gas reserves are finite and getting more expensive to extract, while renewable fuels like wind and solar are getting cheaper to utilize.

Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, a lead author on the third IPCC Assessment Report, explained last month in Slate that it is getting harder and more expensive to squeeze oil out of the ground.
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By Jessica Goad

The United States is in the midst of an energy boom, seen for example in the rise of U.S. oil production to its highest level in 20 years. But this hasn’t stopped the oil and gas industry from clamoring for more access to public lands for drilling, and from criticizing the Obama administration for “[putting] in place more obstacles” and setting public lands “off-limits” to development.

For example, Senator David Vitter (R-LA), Ranking Member on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, even went so far as to state, “There’s no disputing the fact that our nation’s domestic energy production on federal lands has been stymied by this administration.”

But a new report released today by the Denver-based Center for Western Priorities called “Follow the Oil” shows that putting the blame on the president and his administration is nothing more than conservative messaging.  Much of today’s boom in oil and natural gas is from unconventional shale “plays,” areas that have only recently been opened through new technology.  And, as the report notes:

Nationwide, 90 percent of all current shale gas plays exist on nonfederal lands, with only 10 percent located on federal lands. Even starker, almost all shale oil resources exist on non-federal lands. Only 7 percent of current shale oil and mixed plays are found on federally-owned lands with the remaining 93 percent on nonfederal lands.

This map shows what those findings look like across the country, and where the industry is “following the oil”:

Additionally, economics are playing a role in driving drilling from public lands to nonfederal lands.  As the report states, “rapid development increased the supply of natural gas, driving down prices, and sending companies searching for other drilling locations and revenue sources.”

In other words, the oil and gas industry has met the enemy, and it is itself.

The release of this report comes at a very opportune time, considering that Sally Jewell, nominee to be the next Secretary of the Interior, will have her confirmation hearing in front of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee this week

And as expected, key members of the committee are preparing to ask her questions about how the administration is stifling drilling on public lands. For example, Energy and Environment Daily reports that Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) will ask Jewell “where she stands on domestic energy development, job creation and federal regulations.”

Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), the Ranking Member on the committee, said she told Jewell in a meeting last week about “resource potential in Alaska, off-shore and in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska and Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and the limitations to access.”

And Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) released a statement after Jewell’s nomination announcement that “The [Interior Department’s] approach has hurt our economy, killed jobs, and prevented states like Utah from generating critical revenue,” so questions about energy on public lands are also likely to come from him.

The report released today shows that, despite all of the questions Jewell may get on drilling on public lands, the industry in the end is “following the oil” to nonfederal lands.

Jessica is the Manager of Research and Outreach for the Public Lands Project at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Evidence of a striking shift in public opinion has begun to crystalize over the last few months: Poll after poll is finding staunch majorities of Americans view global warming as a “serious problem” and that human activity is a major driving cause.

In defiance of received Beltway wisdom, voters even told a recent Yale poll that a candidate’s views on global warming will affect their vote, and that the issue should be a top priority for the President and the Congress. Majorities have even stated that when it comes to deficit reduction, they prefer a tax on carbon emissions to cuts in education, Social Security, Medicare, or environmental protection.

Yesterday, Pew Research released new poll research that re-confirms the trend. When asked to choose between developing “alternative sources such as wind, solar and hydrogen” and expanding “exploration and production of oil, coal and natural” gas as their preferred priority for addressing America’s energy needs, 54 percent of Americans went with alternative energy. Only 34 percent chose continued prioritization of fossil fuels. That’s a drop from the 63 percent high in 2011, but an uptick over the 52 percent response last year.

Furthermore, Independents and Democrats were largely in concert, preferring alternative energy sources by 64 and 59 percent, respectively. Only 33 percent of Republicans went with solar and wind, in contrast to the 54 percent who preferred expanded fossil fuel use. But the distance between the two positions within the Republican group was smaller than the distance in the other two collections of voters.

And that wasn’t all. 62 percent of overall voters favored “setting stricter emission limits on power plants to address climate change,” with Democrats once again taking that position by a wide margin of 72 percent, and Independents coming in at a lower-but-still-impressive 64 percent. Republicans opposed the stricter standards by a 48 percent majority, but were again much more evenly split — the minority of GOP voters who favored the emissions limits close at the majority’s heels with 42 percent.

The age divide also stood out: Voters 18 to 29 supported alternative energy by a whopping 71 percent, and it wasn’t until voters crossed the age 65 that majorities flipped in favor of coal, oil and natural gas expansion.

And if the recent behavior and pronouncements of top lawmakers are any indication, this shift in the national mood is being felt. Newly minted Secretary of State John Kerry, who will shortly decide the fate of the Keystone XL pipeline, declared in his first big speech since his confirmation that, “We as a nation must have the foresight and courage to make the investments necessary to safeguard the most sacred trust we keep for our children and grandchildren: an environment not ravaged by rising seas, deadly superstorms, devastating droughts, and the other hallmarks of a dramatically changing climate.” President Obama came out swinging on the issue of climate change in both his Second Inaugural address and the State of the Union speech calling for new renewable electricity and energy efficiency targets, and warming that “if Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations [from climate change] I will.”

The latest signs from the White House are that Obama may very well use his executive authority to limit the carbon existing power plants may emit, on top of the regulations the Environmental Protection Agency is finalizing for new power plants.

Oil drilling in Utah's Uinta Basin. (Photo: S. Winterton, Deseret Morning News)

By Tom Kenworthy

Extensive oil and gas drilling in the Uinta Basin of northeastern Utah produces the great majority of the chemical air pollution that produces winter ozone in that rural region, a new interagency study has concluded.

“An emissions inventory developed for the study indicates that oil and gas operations were responsible for 98 to 99 percent of” volatile organic compounds “and 57 to 61 percent of” nitrogen oxides in the basin, the study concluded. Those substances combine in the presence of sunshine to produce ozone, which a recent report by the Environmental Protection Agency links to heart and lung diseases and mortality.

The Utah study, conducted by Utah state and federal agencies and three universities, collected data on pollutants last winter. The study said that ozone formation occurs in the region in about half of winter seasons, with severe ozone occurring about one year in four. It said that transport of ozone-producing chemicals from outside the Uinta Basin “is not likely to represent a major contribution to peak ozone events.”

At the press conference announcing the study results, the deputy director of Utah’s Air Quality Administration said ozone levels this year have at times exceeded 130 parts per billion in the basin, far above the 75 parts per billion level considered a health hazard by EPA.

The Utah study follows a recent investigation into ozone in Colorado which found that more than half of the ozone producing chemicals came from oil and gas operations in a community in Weld County, a region that has nearly 20,000 operating oil and gas wells.

Ozone has been a frequent problem during summer months in urban areas of the United States. Wintertime ozone in heavily developed oil and gas regions of the West, including northeastern Utah and western Wyoming, is a relatively new phenomenon fueled in part by snow cover that reflects sunlight and temperature inversions.

The Utah study said that new rules from the EPA requiring so-called “green completions” of oil and gas wells will reduce emissions of VOC’s. A study sponsored by the oil and gas industry criticized that effort, contending it would sharply reduce production.

The Utah study also recommended additional studies to develop ways of reducing ozone in the Uinta Basin. But Brock LeBaron, the deputy head of the state air quality administration, said the state plans no new regulations on the oil and gas industry, favoring instead voluntary steps by energy developers.

“Right now we’re not passing any new rules or regulations,” LeBaron said, according to a report in E&E’s Energy Wire. “We’re not saying you have to control these VOCs from this piece of equipment.”

Tom Kenworthy is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.