The Environmental Protection Agency announced Sept. 12 a proposed rule to end the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP) for most industrial facilities.
Under the GHGRP, over 8,000 energy facilities and suppliers are required to calculate and submit their greenhouse gas emissions annually without risk of penalty. If finalized, the proposal would remove reporting obligations for most large energy facilities, including refineries, power plants, oil wells, landfills, and CO2 injection sites.
Congress authorized funding for the creation of the GHGRP in 2008. The EPA, under the Obama administration, promulgated the program and began collecting data in 2010. The stated purpose of the GHGRP was to provide the EPA with a sense of emissions to help inform climate policies, improve national emissions estimates, and to aid companies in identifying opportunities for pollution reduction. Reports indicate that refineries, power plants, wells and landfills have reported a combined 20-percent drop in emissions since the rule took effect.
The EPA’s recent proposal follows its determination that there is no requirement under the Clean Air Act to collect greenhouse gas emission information from businesses and that such collection is not useful to fulfill the EPA’s statutory obligations. Following notice of the EPA’s proposal, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the EPA’s proposal will save American business up to 2.4 billion in regulatory costs while maintaining the agency’s statutory obligations under the Clean Air Act. According to Zeldin, the GHGRP program “is nothing more than bureaucratic red tape that does nothing to improve air quality.”
Critics of the EPA’s proposal claim that state and local lawmakers depend on the GHGRP reporting data and that reporting requirements have led to public accountability and pushback from investors. Certain entities, such as the Environmental Defense Fund and the Sierra Club, have already indicated their intent to challenge the EPA’s proposal in court if placed in effect.
The Environmental Defense Fund previously sued the Trump administration in March, challenging the EPA’s monthlong shutdown of the GHGRP’s reporting portal and its extension of the 2025 reporting deadline without public comment. That litigation is still pending.
The EPA, on the other hand, claims that eliminating most emission reporting requirements will reduce regulatory burdens so that companies can “focus compliance expenditures on actual, tangible environmental benefits.”
Under the EPA’s proposal, all greenhouse gas reporting requirements will be removed except for entities classified under subpart W — petroleum and natural gas systems that are subject to the Waste Emissions Charge (WEC) of Section 136 of the Clean Air Act (passed by Congress in 2022 to penalize oil and gas companies that emit more than 23,000 tons per year of CO2). However, in accordance with President Trumps’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which amended Section 136, the EPA will not be collecting subpart W data until 2034.
The EPA on Tuesday initiated a six-week public comment period to solicit input for its proposal. Goldberg Segalla will continue to monitor this proposal for any updates.