Costs of Inefficient Regulation: Evidence from the Bakken

Gabriel E. Lade, Ivan Rudik

NBER Working Paper No. 24139
Issued in December 2017
NBER Program(s):Environment and Energy Economics

Efficient pollution regulation equalizes marginal abatement costs across sources. Here we study a new flaring regulation in North Dakota's oil and gas industry and document its efficiency. Exploiting detailed well-level data, we find that the regulation reduced flaring 4 to 7 percentage points and accounts for up to half of the observed flaring reductions since 2015. We construct firm-level marginal flaring abatement cost curves and find that the observed flaring reductions could have been achieved at 20% lower cost by imposing a tax on flared gas equal to current public lands royalty rates instead of using firm-specific flaring requirements.

Acknowledgments

Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX

Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w24139

Published: Gabriel E. Lade & Ivan Rudik, 2020. "Costs of inefficient regulation: Evidence from the bakken," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, . citation courtesy of

Users who downloaded this paper also downloaded* these: