Washington
Examiner
By John Siciliano
Jun 14, 2017
The Interior Department plans to not enforce methane
emission rules for fracking on federal lands, after congressional Republicans
failed to repeal the regulations.
The agency's Bureau of Land Management will announce
the decision in Thursday's Federal Register, saying it intends to postpone the
emission rule's January implementation "in light of the regulatory uncertainty
created by the pending litigation and the ongoing administrative review,"
according to a pre-publication notice.
"Given this legal uncertainty, operators should
not be required to expend substantial time and resources to comply with
regulatory requirements that may prove short-lived as a result of pending
litigation or the administrative review that is already under way,"
according to the notice.
Litigation is making its way through the courts, and
the department is reconsidering the methane rules under President Trump's
executive order for agencies to conduct reviews of all regulations that are
burdensome under his pro-growth agenda.
The Senate failed in May to pass a resolution of
disapproval under the Congressional Review Act to repeal the methane rules. The
CRA gives lawmakers the ability to rescind regulations within a certain time
period after they have been finalized. That was the last opportunity for
Congress to strike down the regulations, which oil and natural gas drillers
oppose as unnecessary and duplicative.
The Environmental Protection Agency has its own
methane rules for drillers that went into effect last year. The agency
announced Tuesday that it plans to delay its rules by as long as two years to
reconsider and potentially rescind them.
Both the Interior Department and EPA rules target
methane emissions from fracking as part of former President Barack Obama's
climate change agenda. Methane is a short-lived, but potent, greenhouse gas,
which many scientists blame for causing the Earth's temperature to warm,
resulting in sea-level rise and flooding…
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