ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) - New Mexico’s attorney general is calling on the federal government to move quickly in adopting new rules to curb the waste of natural gas and the resulting loss of millions of dollars in royalties that could benefit education and other public programs.

Attorney General Hector Balderas sent a letter to Interior Secretary Sally Jewell this week, saying New Mexico has lost nearly $43 million in royalties since 2009 because of leaks and the venting and flaring of gas wells on federal lands.

Cost-effective technology is available to address the problem, and both industry and states stand to benefit, Balderas said. “As attorney general of one of the states most affected by the venting and flaring rule, I respectfully urge the Department of the Interior to move forward swiftly with a rule to help the people of New Mexico,” he wrote.

The federal Bureau of Land Management, which oversees oil and gas development on federal and Indian lands, said Thursday that it plans to issue a proposed rule to address the issue this fall.

Balderas’ office released the letter Thursday. He joins the chorus of lawmakers and environmentalists who have been pressuring the Obama administration to revamp venting and flaring rules.

In May, an investigation by the Government Accountability Office found that significant amounts of natural gas on federal lands were being wasted, costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars each year and adding to harmful greenhouse gas emissions.

The GAO said it had been urging Bureau of Land Management to update guidelines for the burning or venting of natural gas since at least 2010, when it found 40 percent of it could be captured economically and sold.

Without changes, government investigators called the bureau’s management of oil and gas a “high-risk” for waste and fraud.

Balderas said a new rule also would address pollution in the Four Corners region, which is home to oil and gas development as well as coal mining and coal-fired power plants that serve customers throughout the Southwest. He pointed to satellite images captured between 2003 and 2009 that show a big concentration of methane gas over the region.

Scientists have been working for months to pinpoint the source of the methane hot spot.

Wally Drangmeister, a spokesman for the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association, said producers throughout New Mexico already have made tremendous progress in capturing more gas. Economic benefits, rather than regulation, have driven the changes, he said.

“To put a bunch of proscriptive regulations on things that add a lot of cost with little or no incremental savings of methane emissions, that’s just bad news for the industry,” he said. “The rules need to be based on sound science and data, not innuendoes.”

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