Environmental groups are significantly expanding their litigation challenging the climate change-related analysis supporting federal oil and gas drilling leases across the West, targeting over 2,000 leases in five states while also trying to block nearly 500 separate leases that were the subject of a prior suit from the groups.
The fight over the Trump administration’s plan to scale back implementing rules for the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is kicking into gear, with the proposal’s narrower definition of the “effects” agencies must consider in environmental reviews of major projects emerging as a significant early battleground.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit in a new air permit ruling creates a fresh hurdle for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline intended to bring fracked natural gas from West Virginia to North Carolina.
White House officials are proposing a sweeping overhaul to National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) implementing rules, with the plan scaling back the reach of environmental reviews under the law in an effort to speed major infrastructure projects and other federal actions.
One day after the oil industry sought to tout the greenhouse gas and other benefits of oil and gas drilling, environmentalists are warning that planned expansions throughout the industry could bring a 30 percent increase in GHGs over the next five years, along with corresponding increases in conventional air pollutants that harm public health.
The American Petroleum Institute’s President and CEO Mike Sommers says the oil and gas sector is cutting greenhouse gases but demurred on questions about why it opposes ethanol as a GHG reduction option.
The oil and gas sector is ramping up a public campaign touting economic benefits of energy development -- including reduced carbon dioxide emissions by displacing coal power -- in an effort to push back against Democrats’ election-year push for new limits fossil fuel production and sweeping climate change policies.
EPA is floating a proposed federal air quality plan that would establish a permanent process to streamline Clean Air Act permit approvals for regulating ozone from oil and gas operations in part of Utah that is one of the most active drilling areas in the West, where wintertime ozone levels often exceed federal limits.
The agency is seeking to expand the program that previously allowed new owners to win penalty and other relief after states and industry groups expressed skepticism about it.
The electric power and petroleum sectors are criticizing a model EPA is using to identify industrial sectors for potential new technology-based limits on nutrient discharges, arguing the model makes many flawed assumptions and that the agency is failing to analyze industrial discharges in the broad context of total nutrient loadings to waterbodies.
