Federal EPA Greenhouse Gas Reporting Rule
Comment Period on the Draft Rule - Spring 2009
(top)EPA released published draft rules for greenhouse gas emission reporting requirements on April 10, 2009 in the Fedral Register. This is the rule making process that gave us the "cow tax" in an preliminary version. The comment period ended June 9, 2009.
The proposed rules did not include requirements for reporting "methane from ruminant animals via enteric fermentation." This means the "cow tax" did not make it into the proposed rules and likely will not be adopted.
The rule proposed rule could affect animal feeding operations in other ways. Any "manure management system" that releases more that 25 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivelants annually will be required to report under these rules. This rule, as proposed, would mostly affect large operations using anaerobic lagoons. We estimated that hog operations with 20,000 head and dairy operations with 1,500 head could be affected.
The information sheets about the rule state that other sources of agricultural greenhouse gas release are not to be regulated. Examples of activities not affected by reporting requirements include in-field burning of agricultural residues, composting (not manure), and cultivation of crops.
University of Missouri Commercial Agriculture Program submitted comments to USEPA.
Other materials available on the proposed rule include:- EPA Proposed Rule Fact Sheet.
- EPA Fact sheet on manure storage reporting.
- EPA Fact sheet on impact on agriculture.
- EPA website with the text of the preliminary rule. Warning: preamble and rule combine for more than 1400 pages of text.
At this point EPA is working on developing the final rule and responding to comments. That process can take months to over a year.
(top)