By Ed Sealover | The Sum & Substance
Colorado officials are advancing rules to cut carbon emissions in yet another sector — this time in the midstream sector of the oil and gas industry, a battleground area in which both industry and environmental leaders worry already about the proposed regulations.
The midstream sector is comprised of the pipelines and facilities that transport natural gas from wells to the transmission companies that distribute it to power plants and homes. A key part of the sector — which is made up in Colorado of three major players and a couple dozen smaller companies — is the compression plants that keep the gas moving down long pipelines to its destinations.
As part of efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030, state officials have put rules into place already for sectors ranging from manufacturing facilities to large commercial buildings to gas-powered lawn equipment. They have developed rules both for upstream oil-and-gas well production facilities that extract the resources from the ground and for some midstream oil-and-gas facilities, but these new rules are aimed specifically at what is called the industrial sector of the industry.