The Interior Department’s fracking rule would have set new standards for disposing wastewater from shale oil and gas drilling, required companies to disclose the chemicals they use, and better ensure their wells are properly built.
Advertisement
The result – as the NPR-affiliated StateImpact project has reported – is that fracking is regulated by the states, not by any federal authority.
“Judge Skavdahl – who was appointed by President Obama – initially blocked the rules last summer”, NPR’s Giles Snyder reports. He issued a preliminary injunction against the rules in September and made it permanent in Tuesday’s decision.
But Judge Scott Skavdahl of the District Court of Wyoming on Tuesday ruled out this possibility. “It has not”, he said. “The BLM’s effort to do so through the Tracking Rule is in excess of its statutory authority and contrary to law”. But Skavdahl said the government’s policy intentions were irrelevant to the question of what power it had to promulgate them in the first place.
She added that they were meant to improve safety and help protect groundwater by updating requirements for well-bore integrity, wastewater disposal and public disclosure of chemicals. As Skavdahl notes, it “expressly and unambiguously” excludes fracking from the list of oil and gas production processes that the EPA can regulate. U.S. Senator Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., issued the following statement in response: “Once again the courts have caught the Obama Administration going far beyond its constitutional authority”.
North Dakota also was a party to the lawsuit to block the federal rules. “But it’s important to recognize that this case is not about the federal government’s authority to regulate fracking generally”. Describing Skavdahl’s ruling as “illogical” and “absurd” Snape told Common Dreams the fracking rule “will prevail” before the three judges of the 10th Circuit. Yet the Obama administration has sought to regulate it out of existence.
U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan praised the ruling for acknowledging lawmaker’s powers and for protecting “the energy revolution from the heavy hand of big government”.
Wiseman wrote the article in 2008 when she was a visiting assistant professor in a two-year fellowship position at the University of Texas School of Law.
The comments in her article were meant to indicate that Congress exempted hydraulic fracturing from the Safe Drinking Water Act, “but not to suggest that many other well development stages associated with fracturing, such as flowback disposal and discharge, are exempt from federal laws”, she wrote in her congressional testimony past year.
The Independent Petroleum Association of America and the Western Energy Alliance were joined by Colorado, Wyoming, North Dakota, Utah and the Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation in seeking to block the rules.
Advertisement
The decision centered on whether the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (BML) has the authority to regulate the oil and gas extraction procedure in the state.
