The new rules, expected to be signed and issued this week, adopt most of the core elements of two proposals from 2018 and 2019. Agency officials are fulfilling a directive by President Trump to ease regulations on U.S. energy producers , and have said the rules being eliminated are duplicative of other federal and state rules. They were adopted in 2016 under former President Obama amid concerns about methane-gas leaks contributing to climate change . Methane accounts for about 10% of U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions and it is about 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide in trapping the earth’s heat, according to estimates used by the EPA. Agency figures show the oil-and-gas industry has long been the nation’s largest emitter of methane, even before the shale boom. Steel pipe in a staging area for a pipeline in Pennsylvania. Photo: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images As the drilling boom sent natural-gas production […]