On Friday, the Obama administration announced that it would be making a multi-pronged assault on the emissions of methane, the primary component of natural gas. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, which means efforts to curb its release could affect the trajectory of climate change. But unlike carbon dioxide, it's also a valuable fuel and chemical feedstock. Any efforts made to capture methane before it reaches the atmosphere will be rewarded with a valuable product.

Most of the attention paid to methane emissions is focused on the natural gas industry. To a certain extent, the drilling process and distribution through pipelines will inevitably lead to a certain amount of loss. Some of the practices adopted by the drilling industry, however, simply allow methane to be vented to the atmosphere even though alternate techniques would enable its capture.

The EPA currently has a "Natural Gas STAR" program that's a bit like its voluntary Energy STAR standards. But it recently revamped its estimates of incidental emissions, and the EPA will begin the process of determining whether new regulations can further decrease the losses. The Bureau of Land Management will also re-examine its current regulations on the release of methane during oil and gas drilling on public lands.

In addition to oil and natural gas drilling, methane is often released from coal mines, as it's frequently found in association with the coal deposits. In fact, this methane is a significant safety hazard, since it can build up and trigger explosions. Equipment that currently removes the methane from the mine generally releases it to the atmosphere, but a number of mines have installed equipment that captures methane so it can be sold. The Bureau of Land management will be asked to find ways to encourage the adoption of this equipment in any mines on public land.

The largest source of methane emissions, however, isn't any of the classes of fossil fuel extraction; it's agriculture. Agriculture accounts for 36 percent of the human-driven emissions. Jokes about limiting climate change by controlling cow farts abound, but systems already exist that extract methane from cow manure, something dairy farms already have to collect and dispose of. Several agencies will join together to try accelerating the adoption of these methane digesters as part of a goal to cut agricultural methane emissions by a quarter before the decade is out.

The other source of methane that's tied to organic matter comes from landfills, where bacteria digest our trash and release methane. Again, the technology already exists to capture this methane and use it as fuel; the EPA will simply propose updated standards for methane emissions from landfills, which can necessitate its capture.

This sort of existing regulatory authority is critical given that the administration recognizes that it's going to be overwhelmingly unlikely to get any new regulations through Congress any time soon. However, resource extraction on public lands is already subject to regulation. Methane also contributes to both greenhouse warming and ground-level ozone, both of which are subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act.

In this case, the regulations may be a bit easier to swallow, given that there are economic ways of capturing the methane in almost every case under consideration here.