Saying federal agencies can't keep up with their current workload for leasing federal lands to oil and gas drillers, two industry groups renewed their push Thursday against new regulations signaled by President Barack Obama in his State of the Union speech last week.
"The whole system needs to be updated and streamlined," Western Energy Alliance's Vice President for Government Relations Kathleen Sgamma said, noting that her group of Rocky Mountain producers estimates that more than 40,000 well permits have spent up to seven years navigating the federal bureaucracy. "The whole onshore process needs to be updated."
To add hydraulic fracturing regulations, as the president indicated in his speech last Thursday, was overkill, Sgamma and American Petroleum Institute's senior policy adviser Richard Ranger said in a conference call.
"This is not an issue of [frack fluid] disclosure," Ranger said, noting that most Western states have adopted tougher fluid disclosure fluid disclosure rules. "We're calling for a moratorium on new regulation. We support a fresh look at the way" oil and gas leases are awarded on federal lands.
"We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly 100 years," Obama said in his speech. "I'm requiring all companies that drill for gas on public lands to disclose the chemicals they use. Because America will develop this resource without putting the health and safety of our citizens at risk."
The Department of Interior's Bureau of Land Management has been drafting rules for more than a year covering frack fluid disclosure, wastewater management, and well bore integrity for wells on federal land. No date has been set for their release, a spokesman said Thursday.
"At the President's direction, Interior is taking steps -- in coordination with our federal partners and informed by the input of industry experts -- to ensure that we continue to develop this abundant domestic resource on public lands safely and responsibly," Interior spokesman Adam Fetcher said Thursday.
The states, not an overburdened BLM, should continue to be the primary regulators for oil and gas extraction within their borders, Sgamma and Ranger said.
Noting that a host of federal agencies -- the Environmental Protection Agency for water and air, the Department of Energy for policy, even the Securities and Exchange Commission for reserve calculations by producers -- are already looking at various aspects of shale oil and shale gas extraction, Ranger cautioned that "adding extra layers of regulators for shale" adds uncertainty and delay to an already uncertain process.
