Jackson, Wyoming (Platts)--13Sep2012/400 pm EDT/2000 GMT

Wyoming Governor Matt Mead on Thursday urged federal officials to abandon efforts to regulate hydraulic fracturing, saying states can do a better job of it.

Speaking at the Wyoming Gas Fair in Jackson, Mead reiterated his long-held position that the US Bureau of Land Management erred when it launched an effort to regulate the drilling completion practice on the federal and Indian lands it holds, mostly in the Rocky Mountain West.

"Wyoming should always have primacy in this area," Mead said. He said the state has been a leader in enacting strong measures to regulate fracking and was the first to require producers to reveal the chemical components of their fracking fluids.

He characterized the proposed BLM rule as "a cookie-cutter approach" to regulation.

"It sends a horrible message to a state like Wyoming leader when the federal government comes in," Mead said. "If you want to have the states step up and be responsible, you can't provide a disincentive that says 'we're going to take it over anyway,'" he said.

"If you put Wyoming's fracking regulations up against the BLM's, ours are better in every case," the governor added.

Mead said he sent a letter to BLM Monday protesting the proposed fracking regulations. The BLM said Monday afternoon it had received more than 73,000 comments from state officials, energy industry representatives, environmental groups and members of the general public.

The agency expects to issue a final rule before the end of the year.

Bob King, Wyoming's interim oil and gas supervisor, shared the governor's opinion.

"Most of the rules being proposed by the BLM were duplicative," he said. King added that the state Oil and Gas Conservation Commission hasthe authority to regulate hydraulic fracturing in every oil and gas well in the state, whether it is done on wells on state land, private fee land or federal and Indian land.

He said the proposed BLM fracking regulation includes several alarming aspects that could add unnecessary costs to the drilling of wells in Wyoming. King said that in addition to proposing to regulate fracking itself, the proposed BLM rules also would affect "acid jobs," which producers perform on wells as part of the normal maintenance and which are not directly related to well stimulation.

In addition, King said BLM would require that a producer seek approval 30 days in advance of performing a frack job, which also could add unnecessary delays to the drilling process. But the biggest issue King has with the proposed BLM regulation is that it would require producers to run cement bond logs on surface casing.

The bond log requirement "could result in a multi-day delay," King said, calling it "very costly and unnecessary."

--Jim Magill, jim_magill@platts.com --Edited by Jeff Barber, jeff_barber@platts.com

Creative Commons License

To subscribe or visit go to:  http://www.platts.com