Alex Mills
By Alex Mills
The federal agencies under President Obama continue to press his environmental agenda with the release of three major regulatory changes within the last week.
The first came when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed modification of its controversial wetlands regulations that will increase its oversight of small bodies of water under the Clean Air Act.
EPA commented that the rule change is a clarification of which waters are under federal oversight.
Oil and gas industry’s initial reaction was one of caution because the proposed rule has not been published in the Federal Register, yet. But as it was unveiled on March 25 by EPA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the proposed rule is an attempt to expand the Supreme Court’s 2006 ruling, which narrowed the federal agencies’ regulation of “navigable waters”.
More details on the proposed regulations as they become available.
The second bad news came when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) decided to list the lesser prairie chicken as a “threatened” species under the Endangered Species Act. The listing action could have serious consequences for oil and gas operators with operations and acreage in the habitat area, which includes parts of Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Kansas and Colorado.
The U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service has endorsed a range-wide conservation program that allows companies to obtain legal assurances that their business activities may continue after the bird is listed. Companies participating in the plan will pay an initial enrollment fee and will pay habitat mitigation fees based on actual costs for habitat management and restoration. Fees range from factors like the number of acres impacted, quality of habitat affected and habitat management costs.
The third bomb thrown at the oil and gas industry comes in the president’s “Climate Action Plan: Strategy to Reduce Methane Emissions.”
EPA will assess in the spring of 2014 “several potentially significant sources of methane and other emissions from the oil and gas sector.” This will begin a scheduled two year journey that will include debate over EPA’s attempt to further restrict oil and gas exploration on private lands.
The administration has an additional hold on oil and gas operations on federal lands, and the president’s methane reduction strategy calls for more regulations to reduce venting and flaring on public lands.
The new methane strategy actually covers landfills, coal mines and agriculture, too.
Contrary to the section on oil and gas that talks about increased regulation, the agriculture strategy addresses “emissions exclusively through voluntary action, not through regulation.” And, “the most important voluntary opportunities are through manure management,” according to the study.
The paper doesn’t go into detail about how and who is going to “manage” all of this manure, but someone suggested that this would be an excellent community service project for all of those environmental groups that want to save the world from global warming caused by methane.
Alex Mills is President of the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers. The opinions expressed are solely of the author.
Speak Your Mind