President Donald Trump used a campaign swing through Texas on Tuesday, October 27, to announce that his administration is moving to roll back the Biden-era federal rules that force oil and gas companies to find and fix methane leaks — telling a rally in Lubbock that he was terminating the regulations, in a pre-election pitch built around fuel prices one week before the November 3 midterms.
Source: Reuters (via KRRO)
"Tonight, I'm officially terminating Biden's expensive and unnecessary methane regulations," Trump told the Lubbock crowd, according to rally coverage. The formal step behind the words is an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposal: a White House official told Reuters the EPA plans to roll back rules that required companies to fix leaky equipment and regularly check wells for escaping methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Because it is a rulemaking proposal, it must still go through a public comment period before any final rule is issued — the announcement starts that process rather than completing it.
Texas was a deliberate stage. It is the largest oil and gas producing state in the country, and Tuesday's trip was Trump's third visit to Texas this month, with rallies in Corpus Christi and Lubbock for his hand-picked Senate candidate, Attorney General Ken Paxton. Paxton is locked in a close race with Democrat James Talarico, and Reuters reported that a loss next Tuesday would complicate the Republican Party's path to keeping its slim Senate majority — which is why an energy announcement landed in a campaign speech.
What the proposal would change
According to the White House official cited by Reuters and summaries of the EPA proposal, the plan would give relief to small, low-output wells — the industry's 'marginal wells,' described in coverage of the draft as those producing 15 barrels of oil equivalent per day or less. It would end the 'super emitter' program, under which approved outside groups using remote-sensing technology could report large methane leaks and trigger a required investigation by the operator. And it would ease the rules aimed at phasing out routine flaring — the burning off of gas at oil wells.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin praised the move in a separate statement, casting it as ending a regulatory war on oil and natural gas. The agency said the proposal would cut costs for businesses and consumers, including operators of marginal wells, while adding an estimated 1.41 trillion cubic feet of natural gas output over time, alongside the roughly 210 million barrels of oil the president cited — a volume equal to about 10 days of total US petroleum consumption.
The rules being rolled back
Methane is the main component of natural gas and a powerful short-term warming gas when it leaks unburned into the air. The Biden administration's 2024 rule was the first time the federal government set nationwide methane limits covering existing oil and gas facilities — requiring operators to eliminate and minimise leaks, venting and flaring of methane and related compounds — while an earlier 2016 rule under President Barack Obama covered new and modified sources. Zeldin had already announced in March 2025 that the EPA was reconsidering the Biden-era regulations, so Tuesday's proposal is the formal follow-through on a year and a half of signals.
The argument for, and against
The administration's case is cost and output: methane rules, it argues, burdened smaller producers with leak-detection, inspection and repair obligations, raised the cost of domestic energy and held back production — and with gasoline prices a political liability for Republicans amid the war with Iran, Reuters reported, the White House has paired the rollback with a string of pre-election steps aimed at fuel prices. Trump's October campaign blitz has also taken him to Oklahoma, Alabama, Nebraska, Iowa, Ohio, South Carolina and Mississippi.
Environmental and public-health groups gave the opposite reading within hours: weakening leak detection and repair, ending third-party super-emitter reporting and easing flaring rules will, they warned, increase methane emissions, add near-term warming and worsen air quality for communities living near wells — the same communities that also live with the industry's jobs and royalties. Those warnings are the critics' stated position; how much emissions actually change will depend on the final rule and on state rules, including Texas's own, that remain in place.
Fuel policy is freight policy. Diesel and gasoline prices feed directly into trucking costs, surcharges and the loads available on Texas corridors like I-10, I-20 and I-35 that Punjabi drivers run daily. The administration says this rollback lowers energy costs; whether pump prices actually move will be decided by markets and by the final rule — not by the rally announcement alone.
What happens next
The EPA proposal now enters the federal rulemaking track: publication, a public comment period in which industry groups, states and environmental organisations file their cases, and then a final rule — a process that typically takes months and is routinely challenged in court, as the original 2024 standards were. Politically, the immediate test is closer: Texans vote on November 3, and the Paxton–Talarico Senate race will show whether an energy-and-prices pitch in the oil patch moved the voters it was aimed at.