HARRISBURG — The Independent Regulatory Review Commission approved new air pollution standards for the conventional oil and gas industry on Thursday, over the objections of industry trade groups and Republicans who asserted that the commission shouldn’t have resorted to an emergency approval for get the new rules in place.
The move comes as the state is racing to meet a deadline imposed by the federal government but Republicans argued that the state had known for years that the deadline was on the horizon but put off action until last year.
“Clearly, the emergency rulemaking process was undertaken deliberately on the last day of the 2021-22 legislative session to hamstring the General Assembly on our statutory obligation to review regulations. It is an abuse of the emergency rulemaking process — an emergency created not because the House Environment Committee exercised its prerogative, but because the Wolf Administration’s management of DEP allowed it to go six years — including two years since put on notice by EPA — to promulgate a rulemaking that complies with both the EPA requirements and Pennsylvania’s own statutory standards,” according to a letter submitted to IRRC this week by Sen. Gene Yaw, R-Lycoming, the chairman of the Senate Environmental Resources and Energy Committee, along with other Senate Republicans.
In a separate letter, current House Environmental Resources and Energy Commission Chairman Rep. Martin Causer, said the use of the emergency rulemaking process and other “procedural defects” make the new standards “wide open to legal challenges.”
When Republicans on the House ERE Committee, led by now-former Rep. Daryl Metcalfe, R-Butler, voted in November to express their disapproval of the regulations, former Gov. Tom Wolf blasted the move saying it jeopardized “nearly $1 billion” in federal transportation funding.
But a Department of Environmental Protection spokesman said this week that despite the delay, the federal government accepted the state’s plan and there is no immediate threat that federal dollars will be withheld.
“The deadline for EPA to approve an administratively complete SIP was December 16, 2022. Pennsylvania submitted the State Implementation Plan (SIP) on December 12, 2022. EPA determined that the SIP was administratively complete on December 14, 2022,” said Jamar Thrasher, the DEP spokesman.
The new version of the regulation which is “substantially identical” to the one stalled in late in 2022 is being considered under an emergency certification process in order to meet the federal Environmental Protection Agency deadlines, Mr. Thrasher said.
This regulation would affect more than 4,700 well owners of more than 27,600 facilities in Pennsylvania.
The GOP lawmakers wrote that the regulation would negatively affect citizens and businesses in their districts. They mentioned a legal issue saying the final regulation violates a 2016 state law that requires regulations for conventional wells be handled separately from those for unconventional or deep Marcellus Shale wells.
The letter referred to an earlier decision to split action on an emissions rule for unconventional wells approved by IRRC last July and the conventional well rule.
“It is difficult to claim that this regulation has been separate and independent when it was plucked out of a version of the regulation that was combined with unconventional wells,” the letter said.
In documents submitted to IRRC, the state notes that while the new regulations will force well owners and others in the gas industry to collectively spend about $10 million a year to comply with the new standards, the industry will end up benefiting because those investments will lead to $15 million in savings because there will be less natural gas escaping into the atmosphere.
First Published: April 21, 2023, 3:17 p.m.