Taxpayers for Common Sense Co-founder Jill Lancelot spoke today at the third in a series of public forums being held by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to receive public comment on the draft rule to minimize natural gas waste from federal oil and gas operations. Below is the text of her comments before Department of the Interior officials.

Good afternoon. My name is Jill Lancelot and I am Senior Advisor and co-founder of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a national, non-partisan budget watchdog organization that promotes sound fiscal policy across the federal government.

Since 1995, Taxpayers for Common Sense (TCS) has actively worked to ensure that taxpayers receive a fair return on ALL resources extracted or developed on federal lands and waters, including hardrock minerals, oil, natural gas, coal, wind and solar.

I am pleased to be here today to discuss the important issue of wasted natural gas from oil and gas operations on federal land.

The Mineral Leasing Act of 1920 requires the BLM to ensure that lessees “use all reasonable precautions to prevent waste of oil or gas developed in the land.”  But according to BLM, Federal and Indian onshore lessees and operators lost 375 billion cubic feet (Bcf) of natural gas between 2009 and 2014—enough gas to serve about 5.1 million households for a year.

But this number is likely grossly underestimated. Through Freedom of Information Act requests and analysis of inter-agency discrepancies in data, we have found that – because of poor accounting and self-reporting – this number is likely a vast underestimation of how much is truly being lost. Not only is this gas not providing a valuable source of energy for our nation, it is costing taxpayers millions in lost royalty revenue. Revenue we are due as the resource owners. Revenue that is vitally important to funding both state and federal priorities.

For years, it has been clear that taxpayers are losing revenue. In 2010, the Department of the Interior Inspector General recommended that BLM clarify its requirements for royalty-free use of gas. That same year, the Government Accountability Office found that around 40 percent of natural gas being vented and flared from onshore federal leases could have been economically captured with the use of available control technologies.

In 2014, we released an analysis of federal data obtained from the Office of Natural Resource Revenue that found taxpayers had lost hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue because of large, unaccounted for, quantities of royalty-free gas.

So it is welcome news that the Department of Interior is updating its outdated 30-year-old rules governing lost gas. But there are places we think the draft rule must be strengthened to ensure taxpayers receive a fair return.

For example, the proposed the rule would allow wells that are not already connected to gathering infrastructure to flare associated gas royalty-free, up to the flaring limit. This would potentially be a huge loophole in the new rule and could allow millions of dollars’ worth of natural gas to continue being lost, royalty-free.

BLM has a fiduciary responsibility to taxpayers to ensure that our nation’s public resources are not wasted and that taxpayers are fully compensated for their sale. In the face of a $19 trillion federal debt, taxpayers can afford nothing less.

Thank you for the opportunity to present comments here today. TCS will provide written comments for the record.