There are more than 700,000 wells in the United States that pump almost nothing. They are called stripper wells, and by definition they produce no more than 15 barrels a day. They are old. They are poorly maintained. They leak.
Together they produce 6% of America's oil and natural gas — and about half of all the methane the oil and gas sector puts into the air.
Trump's Environmental Protection Agency is moving to gut the rules that require anyone to look for those leaks.
What the rule does
ProPublica obtained the draft rule, now under White House review. It would drastically weaken the requirements for leak inspections and equipment upgrades at those 700,000 wells, and weaken methane controls across the wider oil industry besides.
It would also kill the EPA program built to track "super-emitter" events — the enormous single methane releases that have long plagued the industry — and to require companies to do something about them. That program has never actually run: the EPA pushed its start date back to January 22, 2027.
The savings to oil and gas companies: $42 billion through 2050. An attached memo says the rollback will help "unleash" American energy.
The EPA's own numbers undercut the EPA's own argument
The agency's stated reason is that complying with the existing rules would cost so much that the lowest-producing wells would have to shut down, and that this would be "unreasonable."
Buried in the same proposed rule is an industry estimate of what shutting those wells would actually cost the country's energy supply: 0.4% of U.S. oil and gas production.
That is the emergency. Four-tenths of one percent.
Methane, meanwhile, accounts for a third of the rise in global temperatures since the Industrial Revolution, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. It also breaks down in the atmosphere in about a dozen years, which makes cutting it one of the very few ways to slow warming inside a human lifetime.
"This is not about energy dominance," said Darin Schroeder of the Clean Air Task Force. "It's about padding the pockets of oil and gas operators and saddling society with the costs."
Who got this done
The rules being dismantled were written in 2024 and would have cut methane pollution from the oil industry by 80%, the EPA said at the time. The agency put their climate, health and energy benefits at more than $7 billion a year — after subtracting what companies would spend to comply.
They were also a direct threat to one specific business model: buying up old, poorly maintained stripper wells and running them.
That is the business of Hilcorp, a privately held company founded and owned by an oil billionaire named Jeffery Hildebrand. After the 2024 rules landed, Hildebrand became one of the oil industry's biggest donors to Donald Trump.
Back in office, Trump appointed a former Hilcorp lobbyist, Aaron Szabo, to a top post at the EPA — and put him in charge of unwinding the methane rules.
Before joining the government, Szabo had helped draft a letter opposing those same rules on behalf of an industry group whose board includes Hilcorp's chief executive. He also advised on climate regulations for Project 2025.
One of Project 2025's recommendations was to eliminate the super-emitter tracking program. The rule Szabo is now overseeing does exactly that.
The EPA's press office said Szabo had not done any work for that industry group "for well over a year" before he started working for the federal government, and that he reviewed federal ethics rules with the agency's ethics staff when he joined.
The number they didn't run
Federal agencies proposing a major environmental rollback normally publish what it will do to the air and to people's health. Trump's EPA, breaking with that precedent, did not include those calculations at all.
So there is a public figure for what oil companies gain — $42 billion — and no public figure for what anyone else loses.
This is now the pattern rather than the exception. The same administration has exempted more than 70 chemical plants from the rule meant to cut their neighbors' cancer risk from toxic air, moved to open 336,400 protected acres beside Chaco Canyon to drilling and uranium mining, and responded to a judge's ruling that its climate grant cuts were illegal by doing nothing at all.
The bottom line
The EPA has drafted a rule, now under White House review, that would drastically weaken leak inspections and equipment requirements at more than 700,000 stripper wells responsible for about half the oil and gas sector's methane, and eliminate the program built to track the industry's largest single methane releases. It would save oil companies $42 billion through 2050, and it replaces rules the agency had valued at over $7 billion a year in climate, health and energy benefits. The EPA justified it by calling the shutdown of those wells "unreasonable," while its own proposal puts their contribution to national production at 0.4%. The official running the rollback previously lobbied for a company built on buying those wells, whose owner became one of the industry's biggest Trump donors. The agency published no estimate of the health or environmental cost.
Source
EPA to Loosen Methane Rules, Boosting Pollution From Oil and Gas Wells — Alex Cuadros, ProPublica, September 11, 2026. Photo of a Hilcorp well site in New Mexico courtesy of Earthworks.
