{"id":2871,"date":"2018-01-03T15:30:10","date_gmt":"2018-01-03T21:30:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pickettoil.wordpress.com\/?p=361"},"modified":"2018-01-03T15:30:10","modified_gmt":"2018-01-03T21:30:10","slug":"fracking-rules","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pickettoil.com\/store\/fracking-rules\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump scraps Obama-era fracking rule"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Trump administration officially scraps Obama-era rules for fracking on federal land<\/h1>\n

The rules would have, among other things, required companies to disclose the chemicals used in their operations.<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
\n
NATASHA GEILING<\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/em><\/header>\n
WORKERS TEND TO A WELL HEAD DURING A HYDRAULIC FRACTURING OPERATION IN WESTERN COLORADO. (CREDIT: AP PHOTO\/BRENNAN LINSLEY, FILE)<\/em><\/h6>\n

On Friday, the Department of the Interior\u00a0officially repealed<\/a>\u00a0rules created by the Obama administration to regulate the use of hydraulic fracturing on federal lands, signaling an end to a contentious process that has drawn legal challenges from the oil and gas industry.<\/p>\n

Hydraulic fracturing \u2014 or fracking \u2014 is a kind of oil and gas extraction that requires companies to inject large volumes of chemical and sand-laced water into rock formations at high pressure, breaking the rocks and exposing oil and gas within. It\u2019s a controversial process that has been found to increase the likelihood of\u00a0earthquakes<\/a>\u00a0around drill and injection sites, and can pose a threat to\u00a0groundwater<\/a>. Babies born near fracking sites are also more likely to have \u00a0significantly\u00a0low birth weights<\/a>, which could lead to health problems later in life.<\/p>\n

The Obama-era rules, which were finalized in 2015 but never went into effect due to pending litigation, would have required companies to disclose the chemicals used in fracking, as well as forced them to cover storage ponds where companies keep fracking fluids. The rules also would have set more stringent standards on the construction of fracking wells and wastewater management.<\/p>\n

The Department of the Interior said that repealing the rules\u00a0would save<\/a>\u00a0\u201cup to $9,690 per well or approximately $14 million to $34 million per year\u201d in industry compliance costs while doing away with duplicative federal regulations. Opponents of the rules argued that state and tribal regulations already did enough to protect the environment and public health from any dangers associated with fracking, and that the federal rules simply added more regulatory burden for the oil and gas industry.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was clear from the start that the federal rule was redundant with state regulation and politically motivated, as the prior administration could not point to one incident or regulatory gap that justified the rule,\u201d said Kathleen Sgamma, president of Western Energy Alliance \u2014 one of two industry groups that successfully challenged the rule in 2015 \u2014 in a press statement. \u201cWestern Energy Alliance appreciates that BLM under Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke understands this rule was duplicative and has rescinded it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The department\u00a0also claims<\/a>\u00a0that the disclosure of chemicals used by fracking companies is \u201cmore prevalent than it was in 2015 and, therefore, there is no continuing need for a Federal chemical disclosure requirement, since companies are already making those disclosures on most operations, either to comply with state law or voluntarily.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2015, the EPA found that fracking companies disclosed\u00a0just 10 percent<\/a>\u00a0of the chemicals used in their operations. Between January 2011 and February 2013, 428 operators in 20 states filed with\u00a0FracFocus<\/a>, an industry-backed web portal that allows oil and gas companies to voluntarily register the chemicals used in their operations. According to the Interior Department\u2019s repeal of the Obama-era fracking rules, 25 states now use FracFocus for chemical disclosures.<\/p>\n

But proponents of the rules argue that they represented meaningful, common sense updates to a regulatory framework that was created before the advent of fracking some ten years ago.<\/p>\n

\u201cArguing that states have rules that talk about the subject of hydraulic fracturing doesn\u2019t tell you much at all,\u201d\u00a0Michael Freeman, a staff attorney with EarthJustice, told ThinkProgress. \u201cIf you want to look at the value of a rule you have to look at what it is actually doing on a number of issues. The rule eliminates pits to store fracking waste in most cases; most states don\u2019t require that.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2016, after delaying the rules for a year, a Wyoming district court found that the Interior Department does not have the authority to regulate fracking on federal lands. The Interior Department, along with a number of environmental groups, initially appealed the decision, though the department changed its position after Trump took office in 2017. In September, a federal appeals court\u00a0overturned<\/a>\u00a0the 2016 decision \u2014 which opens up the possibility for another administration to issue similar regulations at some point in the future.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s unlikely that the issue has seen the last of its legal challenges, however. Environmental groups are almost certain to challenge the repeal in court, most likely arguing that the repeal violates the Administrative Procedures Act, which holds that agencies cannot make decisions that are \u201carbitrary and capricious.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat the Trump administration has done here is to abdicate its responsibility to protect public lands from the very real risks posed by modern fracking,\u201d Freeman said. \u201cIt\u2019s completely arbitrary. Instead, it simply amounts to a favor for Trump\u2019s friends in the oil and gas industry.\u201d<\/p>\n

Freeman said that EarthJustice was planning to legally challenge the administration\u2019s repeal in the coming weeks.<\/p>\n

Repealing the rules has been a top priority for the Trump administration\u2019s\u00a0deregulatory agenda<\/a>\u00a0since taking control of the White House last year. In March, Trump specifically named the rules as targets for repeal in his\u00a0executive order on energy independence<\/a>\u00a0(the same executive order that kicked off the official the repeal of the Clean Power Plan). But Freeman notes that repealing the fracking rules will hardly usher in an energy boom on federal lands \u2014 according to the Bureau of Land Management\u2019s own assessment, the impact of repealing the rules would be \u201cpositive but seldom significant.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile there could be a small positive impact on the development of Federal and Indian oil and gas leases, the proposed rule is unlikely to substantially alter the investment decisions of firms and is unlikely to affect the supply, distribution, or use of energy,\u201d the BLM\u00a0concluded in July<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Retrieved from the internet 01\/03\/2017 from\u00a0https:\/\/thinkprogress.org\/trump-administration-repeals-obama-fracking-rules-f4595696dff7\/<\/em><\/span><\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Trump administration officially scraps Obama-era rules for fracking on federal land The rules would have, among other things, required companies to disclose the chemicals used in their operations. NATASHA GEILING\u00a0 JAN 2, 2018, 3:32 PM WORKERS TEND TO A WELL HEAD DURING A HYDRAULIC FRACTURING OPERATION IN WESTERN COLORADO. (CREDIT: AP PHOTO\/BRENNAN LINSLEY, FILE) On … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2871","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oilfield","category-shale"],"yoast_head":"\nTrump scraps Obama-era fracking rule - Pickett Oilfield, LLC<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/pickettoil.com\/store\/fracking-rules\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Trump scraps Obama-era fracking rule\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Trump administration officially scraps Obama-era rules for fracking on federal land The rules would have, among other things, required companies to disclose the chemicals used in their operations. 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