The Approach
The rule is not final until it survives the comment period and the litigation
Air and greenhouse gas regulation is moving faster than most compliance teams can absorb.
In the past two years, operators have watched the Waste Emissions Charge get repealed by Congress and pushed to 2034, the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program proposed for near-total rescission, the 2009 Endangerment Finding rescinded, and the OOOOb/OOOOc methane rules amended twice while remaining in force.
Every one of those actions had a comment period. Every one is subject to challenge. Operators who engaged early shaped outcomes. Operators who waited for the trade press are now reacting to rules they had no hand in.
Coverage
Rulemakings we track
- NSPS OOOOb and EG OOOOc, from federal amendments through state plan development and RULOF determinations
- The Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program reconsideration and Subpart W proposals
- NESHAP amendments for oil and natural gas production and for transmission and storage
- State air and methane programs, including New York 6 NYCRR Parts 203 and 253
- The EU Methane Regulation and its MRV equivalence requirements for US-origin gas
Compliance strategy under uncertainty
The hardest question is usually not what the rules say. It is what to do while they are in flux. Do you build to a standard that may be relaxed? Do you pause a capital program waiting for a final rule that may never arrive?
We help operators make those calls deliberately, with a documented rationale that holds up if the decision is questioned later. In our experience the deciding variable is capital lead time more than legal odds. If a control project takes eighteen months to execute and the rule resolves in twelve, waiting costs more than building. If the reverse, waiting is rational.
What matters as much as the decision is recording the reasoning at the time. A deferral that was reasoned and documented is defensible. The same deferral, undocumented, looks like inattention.
Positioning
Why an engineering firm and not a law firm
Counsel handles the legal argument. What moves a technical rule making is usually the technical record: whether a proposed detection threshold is achievable with available instruments, what a monitoring requirement actually costs per site, whether an emission factor matches measured reality.
We are engineers who measure emissions and read Federal Register preambles. We work alongside your counsel rather than in place of them, and we supply the part of the record they cannot generate.