Oil companies face a new fine for methane. Trump could scrap it.

Oil and gas companies will be required to pay a first-ever nationwide fee for emitting methane, a potent greenhouse gas, under a new rule finalized Tuesday.

Environmental Protection Agency officials announced the rule during the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, aiming to demonstrate U.S. leadership on global warming despite Donald Trump’s recent election. Trump has vowed to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement, as he did during his first term, and his administration is expected to scrap the methane rule, along with dozens of other climate policies targeting the fossil fuel industry.

As long as the new federal fee remains in place, EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in a statement Tuesday, it will “improve efficiency in the oil and gas sector, support American jobs, protect clean air and reinforce U.S. leadership on the global stage.”

Methane is responsible for nearly a third of the rise in global temperatures since the Industrial Revolution began, according to the International Energy Agency. Although it breaks down much faster than carbon dioxide, it traps about 80 times as much heat in Earth’s atmosphere in the short term.

The oil and gas industry ranks as the largest industrial source of methane emissions in the United States. The planet-warming gas can leak from wells, pipelines, storage tanks and other fossil fuel infrastructure. Large amounts of methane also escape from microbes - the tiny organisms that live in cows’ stomachs, agricultural fields and wetlands.

President Joe Biden’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, authorized the EPA to levy a fee on wasteful methane emissions from large oil and gas facilities. The fee starts at $900 per metric ton of emissions in 2024, increasing to $1,200 in 2025 and $1,500 in 2026.

If the fee remains in effect through 2035 - an unlikely scenario after Trump’s election - it would prevent 1.2 million metric tons of methane from entering the atmosphere, according to the EPA. That is the equivalent of taking nearly 8 million gasoline-powered cars off the nation’s roads for a year, the agency said.

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In a proposed rule issued in January, the EPA first detailed how the methane fee would be calculated and implemented. The American Petroleum Institute, the top lobbying arm of the U.S. oil and gas industry, slammed the proposal in a statement at the time, calling it a “punitive tax” that could choke domestic energy production.

“API supports smart, effective methane regulations, yet this rule hampers our ability to meet the growing energy needs of American families and businesses and fails to advance meaningful emissions reduction,” Dustin Meyer, the institute’s senior vice president of policy, economics and regulatory affairs, said in a statement Tuesday. “This is the wrong approach on methane policymaking, and we look forward to working with the incoming administration and new Congress to get this right.”

The American Exploration and Production Council, a group of 30 mostly independent oil and gas producers, drafted a blueprint for a second Trump administration that calls for repealing the methane fee, according to internal documents obtained by The Washington Post. Many of the group’s members have also increased their flaring of methane, a process in which the gas is burned rather than trapped and used as energy.

Environmental groups have championed the methane fee, calling it crucial for pushing companies to cut flaring.

The fee “is consistent with a core principle shared by all Americans - that polluters should be responsible for their fair share,” Mark Brownstein, senior vice president of energy transition at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), said in a statement Tuesday. The EDF recently helped design and launch a satellite to monitor the biggest methane leaks from the world’s oil and gas fields.

At last year’s U.N. Climate Change Conference in Dubai, Regan announced separate regulations intended to further curb methane emissions from oil and gas operations. Companies that comply with these standards will be exempt from the new fee.

The Biden administration has taken a flurry of other steps to crack down on methane emissions, although these actions have largely targeted the oil industry rather than other sources of methane, such as livestock and landfills. In March, for instance, the Interior Department began requiring oil and gas firms to prevent methane leaks from their operations on federal and tribal lands nationwide.

At the U.N. Climate Change Conference, known as COP29, the United States, China and Azerbaijan hosted an event Tuesday on reducing greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide. Speakers touted the Global Methane Pledge, which aims to cut emissions of the greenhouse gas by 30 percent by 2030.

Yet three years after the United States and the European Union launched the Global Methane Pledge at the global climate talks in Glasgow, Scotland, the world’s biggest methane emitters - including China, India and Russia - have yet to sign on. And concentrations of methane in the atmosphere have continued to climb, with no end in sight.

“Since the Global Methane Pledge was launched, methane emissions have increased. We are moving in the wrong direction,” COP29 President Mukhtar Babayev told delegates.

In his own address to delegates Tuesday, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres sought to inject a sense of urgency into the negotiations, which are scheduled to last two weeks.

“The sound you hear is the ticking clock. We are in the final countdown to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius,” he said, referring to the central goal of the Paris agreement. “And time is not on our side.”