Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
■ The Interior Department rescinded a rule that would have set limitations on fracking on public lands.
Regulation concerned wastewater, new wells
WASHINGTON — On the last business day of the year, the Interior Department rescinded a 2015 Obama administration rule that would have set new environmental limitations on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, on public lands.
The regulation from the Bureau of Land Management, which had been opposed by the oil and gas industry and tied up in court, would have tightened standards for well construction and wastewater management and required the disclosure of the chemicals contained in fracking fluids, probably driving up the cost for many fracking activities.
It had been held in up litigation and had not taken effect. A Wyoming District Court said it exceeded the agency’s authority. Reversing the regulation, the Interior Department said, clears up that legal question and also lifts a costly regulation for the industry, in line with President Donald Trump’s agenda to slash regulations and advance the United States’ “energy dominance.”
The agency said that rescinding the rule would save “up to $9,690 per well or approximately $14 million to $34 million per year” in industry compliance costs. It also noted that because of state, tribal and existing federal regulations, the move “would not leave hydraulic fracturing operations unregulated.”
But Mike Freeman, an attorney with EarthJustice who defended the now-repealed regulation in court, countered that it “was a reasonable and long overdue update of the agency’s old regulations, adopted in the early 1980s, about 35 years ago, and they were developed long before modern fracking became common.”
Industry groups, however, hailed the decision.
“Adding a layer of duplicative federal regulations does not improve on the success of existing state and federal regulations,” said Erik Milito, upstream and industry operations group director at the American Petroleum Institute, in a statement.