BREAKING: Judge Tosses Obama's Authority Over Fracking

A federal judge struck down Barack Obama’s new regulations on fracking, declaring the Bureau of Land Management doesn’t have the authority to impose rules on federal and Indian lands.

U.S. District Court Judge Scott Skavdahl said the Bureau of Land Management was never granted that regulatory power by Congress, instead lawmakers specifically chose to exclude fracking from regulatory oversight, NPR is reporting.

In the ruling, the judge made it clear specifically what he was considering in his ruling.

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“The issue before this Court is not whether hydraulic fracturing is good or bad for the environment or the citizens of the United States,” he wrote. The question, instead, is “whether Congress has delegated to the Department of Interior legal authority to regulate hydraulic fracturing. It has not.”

The BLM rules in question include a requirement that companies drilling for oil and natural gas disclose the chemicals they use in the fracking process. They also mandate storage protocols for recovered wastewater, cement barriers between wells and water zones, and detailed disclosure of the locations of existing wells.

The rules were blocked by Judge Skavdahl last summer, NPR reports, and have been “stayed” since then.

They attempted to address a boon in the industry, but opponents, like the governors of four states where fracking is promising, Colorado, North Dakota, Utah and Wyoming, were opposed to the rules, arguing the BLM overstepped its bounds.

The four states along with the Ute Indian tribe sued the Obama Administration.

And Skavdahl agreed that the BLM, a bureau of the Department of the Interior, had never been granted the authority to regulate fracking.

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For decades, the EPA didn’t consider fracking to be within its regulatory realm, but in the late 1990s, a court ruled that the EPA was responsible for regulating hydraulic fracturing.

Then, during the George W. Bush administration, Congress passed the Energy Policy Act of 2005 with bipartisan support. As Skavdahl notes, it “expressly and unambiguously” excludes fracking from the list of oil and gas production processes that the EPA can regulate. (The only exception is fracking using diesel fuels, which is still under the purview of the EPA.)

The result — as the NPR-affiliated StateImpact project has reported — is that fracking is regulated by the states, not by any federal authority.

Skavdahl concludes that, because Congress specifically removed federal authority to oversee fracking, the nation’s legislators weren’t intending for another federal agency to step in and take on a similar role.