Trump in Lubbock Says He Is Terminating Biden-Era Methane Rules, Promising Texas a $45 Billion Unlock for Natural Gas

LUBBOCK - President Donald Trump made an energy announcement in the middle of a campaign rally on Tuesday night. "Tonight, I'm officially, terminating Biden's expensive and unnecessary methane regulations," Trump told the crowd at the Lubbock Memorial Civic Center, USA Today reported in its live coverage. He said he was suspending former President Joe Biden's methane rules, a move he told the rally would save consumers and energy producers $45 billion and unlock Texas' natural gas.

The announcement did not come entirely out of the blue. Earlier this month, the Environmental Protection Agency indicated it would be relaxing rules around methane emissions from oil and gas drilling, and Bloomberg was the first to report Trump's planned announcement, USA Today reported. The $45 billion savings figure is the president's own claim, made from the stage in an oil-and-gas city, in a state whose gas fields are the industry's center of gravity - it is carried here as his claim, not as an independent estimate.

Methane is the main component of natural gas and a greenhouse gas that scientists say is contributing to global warming, which is why the Biden-era rules targeted emissions from drilling operations in the first place. Tuesday's announcement, made one week before the November 3 midterms in the middle of Trump's second Texas rally of the day, puts the regulatory fight directly into the state's closing campaign argument: cheaper energy production, argued in Lubbock, against the emissions rules written in Washington.