Quote of the Day:
“I have the view, that the issue of fracking is the Achilles heel for our natural gas industry.”- Sectretary of the Interior Ken Salazar

Regulatory cap-and-trade
With Congress and the American people rejecting cap-and trade, the Obama Administration has employed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to achieve similar ends. Delaying job-killing regulations until after the November election, the EPA is currently sitting on numerous proposed rules sure to increase the cost of energy.

A recent report from Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.) unearths thirteen regulations likely to hit American consumers should President Obama be re-elected.

Every single day until November 6, ATR will highlight a pending EPA regulation.
 

Hydraulic Fracturing: 1.449 billion to 1.615 billion annually

From the Inhofe Report:

Today the Obama administration – through no less than fourteen federal agencies,
including the EPA, the Department of Energy (DOE), the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the Center for Disease Control (CDC), the Department of Agriculture (USDA), and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) – is currently working to find ways to regulate hydraulic fracturing at the federal level, so that they can limit and eventually stop the practice altogether. In order to curtail hydraulic fracturing on public lands, BLM, under Secretary Salazar’s control, will be finalizing new regulations sometime after the election, which will have serious impacts on domestic energy production. According to one study, “The total aggregate cost for new permits and well workovers resulting from this rule would range from $1.499 billion to $1.615 billion annually. This is a conservative estimate of the delays and costs associated with the proposed rule which equates to about $253,800 per well, and $233,100 per re-fracture stimulation.” The Obama Administration’s anti-hydraulic fracturing agenda doesn’t stop there. In the months following the election, we can expect the EPA alone to: issue guidance for the usage of diesel fuels during hydraulic fracturing, which will strip states of the primacy granted to them through the Safe Drinking Water Act; complete a study – highly criticized and unsupported by multiple state and federal agencies – desperately attempting to link hydraulic fracturing to water contamination in Pavillion, WY; answer countless petitions filed by radical environmental organizations potentially leading to the back-door regulation of hydraulic fracturing through the Toxic Substances Control Act, Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, and Clean Air Act; and potentially introduce Effluent Limitations Guidelines for both shale gas extraction and coalbed methane.

Natural gas is already regulated on the state and federal level – tens of thousands of wells have been drilled over the past decades. Further regulating an accountable industry will only result in slower growth and energy development.

Does your Senator want efficient, reliable energy?
Earlier this year the Senate voted to overturn on the EPA’s most damaging regulations, the Utility MACT. If your Senator voted “Yes.” They wanted to repeal the Utility MACT; if they voted “Nay,” they voted to preserve the job-killing measure.