Commercial Agriculture Program
Fall 2009
EPA Greenhouse Gas Monitoring Rule Finalized
By John Lory, Ray Massey and Joe Zulovich, Commercial Agriculture Program
USEPA is under court order to address greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. In a first step to that process, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released the final version of Mandatory Reporting of Greenhouse Gases Rule on Monday September 21, 2009. USEPA acknowledged that this rule is a preliminary step to instituting a “cap and trade” approach to regulating greenhouse gas emissions in the US.
The rule seeks to monitor greenhouse gas emissions from facilities that emit more than 25,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents every year. This reporting threshold will include 85% of the emitting sources according to EPA statistics.
Most farm sources of greenhouse gases were not included in the rule. Greenhouse gas emissions from activities such as tillage, rice production, burning of agricultural land, nitrogen fertilization and enteric fermentation of cows (belching of methane) were not included in the rule.
The one farm source included in the rule was methane and nitrous oxide emissions from manure storage facilities. Farms with large manure storage facilities, particularly anaerobic lagoons could be required to report to EPA under the new rules.
- Operations with an annual average inventory of confined animals of fewer than the following number of animals will not need to report: 29,300 beef cows, 3,200 mature dairy cows (not including calves and heifers), 34,100 swine, 723,600 layers, 38,160,000 broilers and 7,710,000 turkeys.
- Operations with an average annual inventory of confined animals greater than or equal to these numbers will need to calculate their annual greenhouse gas emissions based on USEPA mandated equations. If the result is greater than 25,000 metric tons then they will need to report to USEPA.
Inventory will be assessed as the sum of emissions from storages on contiguous, or adjacent land. Affected operations will first need to report emissions from calendar year 2010 by March 31, 2011. USEPA is planning on providing a calculation tool on the web to help facilitate determining if your operation will need to report under these rules.
The Commercial Agriculture Program submitted comments to USEPA in June 2009 addressing technical problems with manure storage reporting requirements and trying to make the rule more feasible for farmers. We contended that the state of the art for estimating methane emissions from manure storages is based on lookup tables for emission factors so there was little new information obtained by requiring farmers to report.
USEPA did eliminate the requirement requiring affected farmers to sample fresh manure monthly consistent with our recommendations. We still contend that there are significant errors in how USEPA will calculate methane emissions from anaerobic lagoons.
For more information on the final rule see the USEPA website at http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/ghgrulemaking.html.