Actions

Like other cities and its own county in Colorado, the Boulder City Council is set to consider two actions related to the use of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) on open space within the city limits.

After relying on industry voluntary actions regarding drilling setback and water sampling approaches, Colorado regulators are poised to establish new mandatory rules covering exploration and production (E&P) companies.

Government fleets are continuing to embrace natural gas as an alternative fuel as evidenced by recent actions in Pennsylvania, New York City and Denver, and the trucking industry at a recent national summit meeting did the same.

New York Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) Commissioner Joseph Martens has rejected a call to conduct an independent review of the public health impacts of high-volume hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and instead asked the New York State Health commissioner to assess DEC’s health impact analysis to determine whether to permit fracking in the state.

FERC Monday said it is holding a technical conference in late September to discuss actions that industry has taken in response to an August 2011 report on the weather-driven power outages and natural gas curtailments in early 2011.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is operating under a “misperception of initial production from gas wells,” which “has led to a drastic overestimate of methane emissions from hydraulically fractured [fracked] natural gas wells,” according to Darren Smith, environmental manager for Devon Energy Corp.

Commissioner Scott O’Malia of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), a frequent critic of the agency’s Dodd-Frank actions, says many of the rules approved by the agency so far are “unnecessarily complicated, confusing and, in some cases, redundant.”

Commissioner Scott O’Malia of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), a frequent critic of the agency’s Dodd-Frank actions, last week said many of the rules approved by the agency so far are “unnecessarily complicated, confusing and, in some cases, redundant.”

Capping off a string of regulatory actions that have been favorable to the oil and natural gas industry — and somewhat embarrassing to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) — the regulator last week delayed the release of final air pollution standards for hydraulic fracturing (fracking).