WASHINGTON — The Obama administration Friday issued the first federal mandates governing hydraulic fracturing on public land, triggering an immediate lawsuit from oil industry groups and a pledge by congressional Republicans to undo the regulation.
The measure from the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management updates 30-year-old drilling regulations, forcing companies to disclose the chemicals they pump underground and store wastewater in tanks instead of open pits. It also lays out mandates for verifying the integrity of wells on public land and conducting the hydraulic fracturing process that has proved critical to unlocking oil and gas from dense rock formations nationwide.
Although the rule only applies to development on public and tribal lands — where there are more than 100,000 oil and gas wells today — environmentalists have argued tough federal protections could provide inspiration for state regulators.
The measure will have broad reach in some Western states with large swaths of public land under the the bureau's control, including New Mexico, where some 13.4 million acres — about 17 percent of the state — are managed by the bureau. There will be a limited direct effect on oil and gas operations in Texas, where there is virtually no public land, but the rule is of critical importance to energy companies based in the Lone Star State.
While the final rule falls well short of some environmentalists' call for a total ban on fracking, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell insisted it provides an essential update to outdated federal regulations and could go a long way to ensuring public confidence in the oil and gas drilling that has helped make the United States an energy superpower.
Jewell suggested the industry should embrace the new mandates, which come amid "a lot of public fear" about the hydraulic fracturing process that involves pumping water, sand and chemicals underground to open the pores of oil- and gas-bearing rock.
"Thoughtful regulation" can help the oil industry, she said, "because it reassures the public that rules are in place that protect them."
The oil industry wasted no time in challenging the new rule, with the Independent Petroleum Association of America and the Western Energy Alliance immediately filing a lawsuit against the measure in a Wyoming-based federal district court. The groups contend that the rule unnecessarily and arbitrarily imposes one-size-fits-all federal mandates on top of well-tailored state regulations.
"States have been regulating for years and have put together very stringent rules on well bore construction and hydraulic fracturing," said Kathleen Sgamma, vice president of government and public affairs for the Western Energy Alliance. "There's just no regulatory gap that exists."
The rule also drew a swift rebuke from environmentalists, who said it did not do enough to safeguard communities, wildlife and the water on which they depend.
"These rules put the interests of big oil and gas above people's health and America's natural heritage," said Amy Mall, senior fracking policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "These rules fail to protect the nation's public lands — home to our last wild places and sources of drinking water for millions of people — from the risks of fracking."
The measure, now set to take effect in 90 days, will require oil companies to disclose the chemicals they use in hydraulically fractured wells. But, in a concession to the oil industry, those disclosures will be allowed through the not-for-profit FracFocus registry and will only be required within 30 days of completing fracturing operations — not before, as some environmentalists had wanted.
Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals Management Janice Schneider said the post-fracturing disclosure allows for a realistic accounting of the chemicals that actually are pumped into a well, not a company's best guesses about what might be used beforehand.
Oil and gas companies that want to invoke trade secrets to shield chemical information must submit affidavits justifying the exemptions.
The rule also imposes new requirements for validating the integrity of all wells and verifying there are strong cement barriers keeping the well hole isolated from underground water supplies.
In most cases, companies will be barred from using open-air pits to temporarily store the waste water that flows out of hydraulically fractured wells. Instead, companies would be required to keep those recovered fluids "in rigid enclosed, covered or netted and screened above-ground storage tanks, with very limited exceptions that must be approved on a case-by-case basis."
Source: Top Stories - Google News - http://ift.tt/1xJpz75
0 comments:
Post a Comment