Tomblin Weakened WV’s Executive Order on Drilling

Check­ing in on our neigh­bors to the southwest…

Act­ing West Vir­ginia Gov­er­nor Earl Ray Tomblin imposed a set of emer­gency orders  last month cov­er­ing nat­ural gas drilling in the Mar­cel­lus Shale.

The guide­lines are meant to reg­u­late the indus­try, as law­mak­ers debate a more per­ma­nent set of rules.

The Charleston Gazette has taken a closer look at the order’s ini­tial draft, and reports Tomblin weak­ened its lan­guage before sign­ing the document:

Lan­guage in the order was rewrit­ten to limit a new require­ment for pub­lic notice for drilling per­mit appli­ca­tions and to reduce the over­sight of oil and gas oper­a­tions by reg­is­tered engi­neers, the records show.

The changes are reflected in drafts of the exec­u­tive order released in response to a Gazette FOIA request and a draft posted online by the indus­try group Ener­gize West Virginia.

Details of why the changes were made are not fully avail­able, in part because the governor’s office has refused to make pub­lic its cor­re­spon­dence with indus­try lob­by­ists who were help­ing craft state drilling policies.

Sen­ate Pres­i­dent Earl Ray Tomblin, act­ing as gov­er­nor, issued the exec­u­tive order to require new rules from the state Depart­ment of Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion, in response to grow­ing pub­lic pres­sure fol­low­ing the fail­ure of any Mar­cel­lus leg­is­la­tion to win approval ear­lier this year.