Federal judge throws out Obama drilling rules by AURaptor

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Federal judge throws out Obama drilling rules

POSTED BY: AURAPTOR
UPDATED: Tuesday, August 16, 2011 17:14
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Monday, August 15, 2011 8:16 AM

America loves a winner!

Federal judge throws out Obama drilling rules

By MEAD GRUVER
updated 8/12/2011 8:10:41 PM ET

CHEYENNE, Wyo. — A judge on Friday threw out Obama administration rules that sought to slow down expedited environmental review of oil and gas drilling on federal land.

U.S. District Judge Nancy Freudenthal ruled in favor of a petroleum industry group, the Western Energy Alliance, in its lawsuit against the federal government, including Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.

The ruling reinstates Bush-era expedited oil and gas drilling under provisions called categorical exclusions on federal lands nationwide, Freudenthal said.

The government argued that oil and gas companies had no case because they didn't show how the new rules, implemented by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service last year, had created delays and added to the cost of drilling.

Freudenthal rejected that argument.

"Western Energy has demonstrated through its members recognizable injury," she said. "Those injuries are supported by the administrative record."

An attorney for the government declined to comment but Kathleen Sgamma, director of government and public affairs for the Denver-based Western Energy Alliance, praised the ruling.

"She completely discounted the government's argument that the harm was speculative," Sgamma said of the judge.

The Energy Policy Act of 2005 allows the BLM and Forest Service to invoke categorical exclusions and skip new environmental review for drilling permits under certain circumstances.

The circumstances include instances where companies plan to disturb relatively little ground and environmental review already has been done for that area. A categorical exclusion also can be invoked when additional drilling is planned at a well pad where drilling has occurred within the previous five years.

Categorical exclusions were widely used throughout the West — especially in the gas boom states of Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico — until last year.

In Wyoming, the BLM invoked categorical exclusions for 87 percent of the new gas wells drilled in the Upper Green River Basin between 2007 and 2010. Those drilling permits added up: Close to 3,000 over those three years in the basin's Jonah Field and Pinedale Anticline gas fields.

The Jonah Field and Pinedale Anticline ranked fifth and sixth for gas production in the U.S. in 2009.

Federal land agencies adopted new rules for interpreting the Energy Policy Act last year in response to an environmentalist lawsuit over the use of categorical exclusions. The Western Energy Alliance sued over the new rules last fall.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44127172/ns/business-oil_and_energy/t/fede
ral-judge-throws-out-obama-drilling-rules/#.TklLnmM61U6

" I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend. "

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Monday, August 15, 2011 12:56 PM

BYTEMITE

I wonder what's in their water.

Also, the issue is not lands that the companies already own, but speculative lands, and despite the exclusions the BLMs of the states in question were shown to have not conducted sufficient environmental review of the parcels prior to auction. The auctioned lands have not gone through because of this.

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Monday, August 15, 2011 2:46 PM

NIKI2

Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...

Hey, who needs environmental reviews? Hell, we've got LOTS of land, LOTS of water, why worry? Capitalism is good, the big corporations will take care of us, watch over us, keep us safe--everyone knows that! So we have a huge spill or two every few years, it's a big country, and Nature can fix everything. All this fuss about stuff in our drinking water and so forth is just scare tactics. We shouldn't rock the boat, as Raptor has said, we all have clean water to drink.

Don't we?

Hippie Operative Nikovich Nikita Nicovna Talibani,
Contracted Agent of Veritas Oilspillus, code name “Nike”,
signing off

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Monday, August 15, 2011 6:20 PM

DREAMTROVE

Quote:
Originally posted by Bytemite:
I wonder what's in their water.

This cracked me up.

Rap, alas, you make Obama sound a lot better than I think he really is. I think he's selectively limiting supply so that his friends can get more drilling rights and better prices.

Actually, I've pretty much come to the conclusion that this admin. Is basically run by tim geitner.

That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.

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Monday, August 15, 2011 7:15 PM

RIONAEIRE

Beir bua agus beannacht

I understand the need for oil that comes from here instead of the middle east, until we can figure out something better than oil and get it going. I think there should be a balance, oil drilling has to be done safely because it isn't okay to have another disaster like the one in the gulf or worse. The problem I see is that sure we don't drill in the gulf anymore, but Brazil does, they're now drilling there so the same thing could happen, but if it doesn't then someone is getting all that money and all that oil that technically belongs to us. So I have mixed feelings about drilling in America.

"A completely coherant River means writers don't deliver" KatTaya

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Tuesday, August 16, 2011 5:03 AM

BYTEMITE

This isn't regular oil, it's oil shale. It's fracking, it's the same thing going on with natural gas, right down to the type of formations and the reservoirs. They're overestimating the yield for investors, and poisoning groundwater.

This is what happened in Vernal, east of me, where the road caught fire in the winter because they were using the frack-water to de-ice it. That's what they're doing, that's what they're talking about.

The US comparatively has very little oil or natural gas. We do have a lot of coal, but that's a bad idea for other reasons. Simply, we will not be able to sustain ourselves on any of that technology, which is why we need to be researching alternative fuels and power sources.

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Tuesday, August 16, 2011 5:14 PM

RIONAEIRE

Beir bua agus beannacht

Ew, well then if its fracking then I'm absolutely not okay with it after all the stuff that DT has said about fracking and how it ruts up the water. Yuck, I thought this was regular oil like out of the gulf or the Alaska pipeline or something.

"A completely coherant River means writers don't deliver" KatTaya

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