 6560-50-P

ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY

[EPA-HQ-OAR-2016-0204; FRL-XXXX-X]

Information Collection Request Submitted to OMB for Review and Approval;
Comment Request; Information Collection Effort for Oil and Gas
Facilities; EPA ICR No. 2548.01, OMB Control No. 2060-NEW

AGENCY: Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

ACTION: Notice.

SUMMARY: The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has submitted an
information collection request (ICR), “Information Collection Effort
for Oil and Gas Facilities” (EPA ICR No. 2548.01, OMB Control No.
2060-NEW) to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for review and
approval in accordance with the Paperwork Reduction Act (44 U.S.C. 3501
et seq.). This is a request for approval of a new collection. Public
comments were previously requested via the Federal Register (81 FR
35763) on June 3, 2016, during a 60-day comment period. This notice
allows for an additional 30 days for public comments. A complete
description of the ICR is provided below, including its estimated burden
and cost to the public. An Agency may not conduct or sponsor and a
person is not required to respond to a collection of information unless
it displays a currently valid OMB control number. 

DATES: Additional comments may be submitted on or before [insert date 30
days after date of publication in the Federal Register].

ADDRESSES: Submit your comments, referencing Docket ID Number
EPA-HQ-OAR-2016-0204, to (1) EPA online using www.regulations.gov (our
preferred method), by email to a-and-r-Docket@epa.gov, or by mail to:
EPA Docket Center, Environmental Protection Agency, Mail Code 28221T,
1200 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20460, and (2) OMB via email
to oira_submission@omb.eop.gov. Address comments to OMB Desk Officer for
EPA. 

EPA's policy is that all comments received will be included in the
public docket without change including any personal information
provided, unless the comment includes profanity, threats, information
claimed to be Confidential Business Information (CBI) or other
information whose disclosure is restricted by statute.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Ms. Brenda Shine, Sector Policies and
Programs Division (E143-01), Office of Air Quality Planning and
Standards, Environmental Protection Agency, Research Triangle Park, NC
27711; telephone number: (919) 541-3608; fax number: (919) 541-0246;
email address:  shine.brenda@epa.gov. 

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION:

Supporting documents which explain in detail the information that the
EPA will be collecting are available in the public docket for this ICR.
The docket can be viewed online at www.regulations.gov or in person at
the EPA Docket Center, WJC West, Room 3334, 1301 Constitution Ave., NW,
Washington, DC. The telephone number for the Docket Center is
202-566-1744. For additional information about EPA’s public docket,
visit   HYPERLINK "http://www.epa.gov/dockets" 
http://www.epa.gov/dockets .

Abstract: Collectively, oil and gas facilities are the largest
industrial emitters of methane in the U.S. In January 2015, as part of
the Obama Administration’s commitment to addressing climate change,
the EPA outlined a number of steps it plans to take to address methane
and smog-forming volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions from the oil
and gas industry. The EPA has recently promulgated new source
performance standards (NSPS) for the oil and gas industry to achieve
both greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions, in the form of a limitation on
methane, and additional reductions in VOCs (40 CFR part 60, subpart
OOOOa; see 81 FR 35824). The EPA has also committed to require standards
of performance for existing oil and gas sources. Section 111(d) of the
Clean Air Act (CAA), as amended, provides a cooperative federalism
approach to establishing standards of performance for existing sources.
Under this approach, the EPA establishes guidelines that identify the
emission performance states must require their sources to achieve, and
states then submit plans for EPA review and approval, which establish
standards of performance that achieve that emissions performance.  

While a great deal of information is available on the oil and gas
industry and has to date provided a strong technical foundation to
support the Agency’s recent actions, the EPA is now seeking more
specific information that would be of critical use in addressing
existing source pursuant to CAA section 111(d). Taking into account the
large number of sources that a national regulation development effort
would need to consider, and the potential for taking a different
approach to addressing co-located existing sources than was taken with
new and modified sources, the EPA requires information that will enable
the development of effective standards for this entire industry under
CAA section 111(d). For new sources, the CAA requires that standards
apply to each new affected facility upon startup. Conversely, without
information allowing for development of a pathway for phasing in
standards, existing source standards will likely apply to all regulated
units at approximately the same time. Currently there are hundreds of
thousands of pieces of equipment across the country in all kinds of
different situations and configurations. To determine how to efficiently
and effectively address emissions from this volume of sources in a
timely, but administrable manner, we need more comprehensive information
that will improve our understanding of what emission controls are being
used (and perhaps shared) in the field, how those are configured, the
difficulty of replacing or upgrading controls, how much time will be
needed to retrofit, what the likely costs of retrofitting are, whether
electricity or generating capacity is available, and how often sites are
staffed or visited. Such information will, for example, allow us to
ascertain if there are effective ways for affected facilities at well
sites, or other co-located facilities, to share emission controls, how
to balance the level of emission reductions with administering a program
of this size, and potential phase in opportunities. 

Additional information will also support the Agency’s efforts to
better understand and explore standards for new, reconstructed, and
modified units not currently covered by NSPS OOOOa. Specifically, the
ICR seeks information related to emissions profiles, as well as cost and
efficiency of controls, which would be helpful to the Agency in
evaluating and identifying “the best system of emission reduction”
in accordance with CAA section 111(b). Additional information will also
support the Agency’s ongoing efforts to evaluate hazardous air
pollutants emitted from the oil and gas industry. The EPA is currently
in the process of evaluating issues raised in several petitions seeking
administrative reconsideration of the 2012 revisions to the National
Emission Standard for Hazardous Air Pollutants, 40 CFR Part 63, subparts
HH and HHH. The ICR includes the collection of information that would be
relevant to this effort. 

Currently, the EPA collects information on GHG emissions from oil and
gas facilities under 40 CFR part 98, subpart W of the Greenhouse Gas
Reporting Program (GHGRP). However, the GHGRP does not collect
information on design, performance, and costs of emission controls. Such
information is necessary to evaluate the scope, design, and potential
impact of future standards of performance for existing oil and gas
facility sources. There are also differences in the definition of
“facility” in the GHGRP for oil and gas production facilities as
compared to the way we have defined facility under our section 111
regulations. As previously stated, “the EPA's definition of
‘facility’ for purposes of 40 CFR part 98 in no way impacts the
‘facility’ definition for similar sources under existing CAA
programs.” 80 FR 64262, 64271. Additionally, certain states have moved
forward with their own rules and have developed information needed for
their own purposes, but this information is not sufficient for a
national rulemaking. Thus, it is necessary to collect specific
information from oil and gas production facilities both for existing
sources and sources not covered by the standards of performance for new
and modified sources to understand the number of affected facilities and
to estimate the facility-level impacts of potentially implementing
existing source standards of various designs.

There will be two parts to the information collection. Part 1, referred
to as the operator survey, is specifically designed to obtain
information from onshore oil and gas production facilities to better
understand the number and types of equipment at production facilities.
Part 1 seeks to collect information regarding production operators
(e.g., facility name, address and contact information) as well as
information on the location and types of equipment (e.g., number of
wells, tanks, separators, dehydrators, and compressors) present at well
surface sites and centralized production surface sites. Part 1 will be
sent to all known operators of oil and gas production wells and will
allow the Agency to obtain the information necessary to identify and
categorize all potentially affected oil and gas production facilities.
The operators will complete the Part 1 survey, including providing
equipment counts for all production facilities that they operate with
the exception of well surface sites selected to complete Part 2. This
operator survey may be submitted either electronically or through hard
copy responses. The submission requires the owner or operator to certify
that the information being provided is accurate and complete.

Part 2, referred to as the detailed facility survey, will be sent to
selected oil and gas facilities across the different industry segments.
Specifically, these industry segments include onshore production,
gathering and boosting, processing, compression/transmission, pipeline,
natural gas storage, and liquefied natural gas (LNG) storage and
import/export facilities. This ICR will not collect information from
offshore production facilities or from local natural gas distribution
facilities. Due to the large number of potentially affected facilities,
Part 2 uses a statistical sampling method considering each industry
segment (and groupings of facilities in the production segment) to be
separate sampling populations. Thus, a statistically significant number
of facilities within each industry segment (or “population”) will be
required to complete the Part 2 detailed facility survey. 

Developing an appropriate sampling size for the onshore production
industry is complicated by the number of factors that could impact the
types of processes or equipment present at the site and the magnitude of
emissions from these sources. Therefore, the Agency considered further
stratification of the production industry segment into separate
populations based on differences in the type of well [oil or natural
gas, production rates, and gas-to-oil ratio (GOR)], the type of
formation, and the production basin. The Agency proposed two options for
establishing different populations within the production segment: one
based on the well type using GOR ranges and one based on regional
groupings of basins. After a review of the comments received on the
first draft of the ICR, we are proceeding with the GOR range groupings
with modifications. Specifically, we are adding a population of
“stripper wells,” which are wells that produce 15 barrels of oil
equivalence per day or less. Comments indicated that these wells
generally make up about 80 percent of the total number of wells, but
only contribute about 10 percent of the crude oil and natural gas
produced in the United States., 

Part 2 will collect detailed unit-specific information on emission
sources at the facility and any emission control devices or management
practices used to reduce emissions. Most of the information requested
under Part 2 is expected to be available from company records and would
not require additional measurements to be performed. However, selected
data elements must be completed based on actual component equipment
counts (specifically, pneumatic device counts and equipment leak
component counts) or measurement data (specifically, separator/storage
vessel flash analyses). If this information is not directly available
for a facility, the respondent will be required to collect and report
this information (count equipment components and/or sample and analyze
tank feed streams) as part of this information collection. The Part 2
survey must be completed and submitted electronically via the EPA’s
Electronic Greenhouse Gas Reporting Tool (e-GGRT).  

The data collected throughout this process will be used to determine the
number of potentially affected emission sources and the types and
prevalence of emission controls or emission reduction measures used for
these sources at existing oil and gas facilities, among other purposes.
This information may also be used to fill data gaps, to evaluate the
emission and cost impacts of various regulatory options, and to
establish appropriate standards of performance for oil and gas
facilities. 

If OMB approves this ICR, respondents will be required to respond under
the authority of section 114 of the CAA.  The EPA anticipates issuing
the CAA section 114 letters by late October, 2016. These letters would
require the owner/operator of an oil and gas facility to complete and
submit the Part 1 survey within 30 days of receipt of the survey, and
would require facilities to complete and submit the Part 2 survey with
120 days of receipt. 

 All information submitted to the Agency in response to the ICR surveys
will be managed in accordance with applicable laws and the EPA’s
regulations governing treatment of CBI at 40 CFR part 2, subpart B. Any
information determined to constitute a trade secret will be protected
under 18 U.S.C. § 1905.  

Form numbers: Production Operator Survey (Part 1); Detailed Facility
Survey (Part 2).

Respondents/affected entities: Respondents affected by this action are
owners/operators of oil and natural gas facilities. Part 1 of this ICR
is specifically requesting information for facilities in the onshore
petroleum and natural gas production industry segment. Part 2 of this
ICR is specifically requesting information for facilities in the
following industry segments:  onshore petroleum and natural gas
production, onshore petroleum and natural gas gathering and boosting,
onshore natural gas processing, onshore natural gas transmission
compression, onshore natural gas transmission pipelines, underground
natural gas storage, LNG storage and LNG import and export equipment.
The ICR is not requesting information for the offshore petroleum and
natural gas production industry segment or from the natural gas (local)
distribution industry segment.

Respondent’s obligation to respond: The information collection in
Parts 1 and 2 is being conducted by the EPA’s Office of Air and
Radiation pursuant to section 114 of the CAA, to assist the
Administrator of the EPA in developing emissions standards for oil and
natural gas facilities pursuant to the CAA.  

Estimated number of respondents: The estimated number of respondents for
Part 1 is 15,000 operators representing approximately 698,800 facilities
(total). The estimated number of respondents for Part 2 is 3,818. 

Frequency of response: This is a one-time survey. 

Total estimated burden: The estimated industry burden is 116,438 hours
for Part 1 and 129,043 hours for Part 2. Therefore, the cumulative
industry burden for all parts of this ICR is estimated to be 245,481
hours. The estimated cumulative Agency burden to administer this ICR
(all parts) is 14,310 hours. Burden is defined at 5 CFR 1320.03(b).

Total estimated cost: The estimated costs for the oil and natural gas
industry is $16,468,625 for Part 1 and $21,223,943 for Part 2. The
resulting total industry costs for all parts of this ICR is estimated to
be $37,692,625, which includes $6,987,000 in operating and maintenance
(O&M) costs to cover mailing hard copies of Part 1 responses and
contracting services for storage vessel feed material flashing analyses
as part of Part 2 responses. The estimated cumulative Agency costs to
administer this ICR (all parts) is $771,398, which includes $104,611 in
O&M costs to send certified CAA section 114 letters to all respondents
selected for Part 1 and Part 2 surveys with electronic return receipt. 



Changes in estimates: This is a new ICR, so this section does not apply.


__________________.

Dated:  

__________________________________

Courtney Kerwin, Director, Regulatory Support Division.

 U.S. Energy Information Administration. “Stripper wells accounted for
10% of U.S. oil production in 2015,” June 29, 2016. Available at:  
HYPERLINK "http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=26872" 
http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=26872 . 

 U.S. Energy Information Administration. “Stripper wells accounted for
11% of U.S. natural gas production in 2015,” July 28, 2016. Available
at:   HYPERLINK "http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=27272" 
http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=27272 . 

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Information Collection Request Submitted to OMB for Review and Approval;
Comment Request; Information Collection Effort for Oil and Gas
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