The Trump administration is set to take concluding steps to repeal the rule set in 2015, by the Former Obama administration, which presets the standards for Hydraulics on the Federal land.
A notice by the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management – BLM was formally sent, as the repeal was made final and was posted publicly. It is due to be published in the Federal Register on Friday.
The repealing of the rule is a part of the Trump administration efforts to pull back the environmental rule that is found to be very unnecessary and, in part, promotes the domestic production of Fossil fuels and all other energy sources.
“This final rule is needed to prevent the unnecessarily burdensome and unjustified administrative requirements and compliance costs of the 2015 rule from encumbering oil and gas development on federal and Indian lands,” the BLM wrote in its notice.
Although the BLM’s notice is not the indication of taking up a position if the agency has any legal authority to put the law into effect. The Republicans and other oil industries disagreed, and so did a federal judge who had the rule overturned, but eventually overruled it on an appeal.
The ruling of 2015 came after years-long deliberation of the Obama administration to decide how best to deal with fracking. Fracking, in essence, is a method, which uses up fluid that is forced underground at a very high pressure to bring out oil and natural gasses that have been trapped in recent years. This leads to a huge oil and gas boom domestically.
The environmentalists are engrossed in the discussion that the fracking process could be potentially harmful to the underground water reservoirs, soil, and air. A Federal Research, which included a very important and known Environmental Protection Agency’s study, concluded that the contamination of water, air, and soil underground can occur by using Fracking and it is also very common.
The Obama-era rule had focused on three main areas; mandating that the company should reveal the chemicals being used for fracking, making the covering of the pond surfaces that contain all the fracking and then setting proper standards for construction of any such wells.
The law was never put into effect, one Wyoming judge – Scott Skavdahl had it on hold back in 2015 and had it overturned in 2016.
The repeal was applauded by gas and oil manufacturing companies.
“The rescinding of this burdensome rule, which was never enacted due to IPAA and Western Energy Alliance’s ongoing legal challenge, will save our member companies and those operating on federal lands hundreds of millions of dollars in compliance costs without any corresponding safety benefits,” Barry Russell – President of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, said in a statement.
“It 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,” said Kathleen Sgamma, the president of the Western Energy Alliance.
Whereas, the environmentalists are of the view that the repeal puts both – the life of humans and wildlife at risk.
“The Trump administration is endangering public health and wildlife by allowing the fracking industry to run roughshod over public lands,” Brett Hartl, a government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement. “Fracking is a toxic business, and that’s why states and countries have banned it. Trump’s reckless decision to repeal these common-sense protections will have serious consequences.”
The repeal of the rule will be immediately in effect. Environmental groups and the Democratic states may then sue the BLM for having the rule up and reinstated.