California’s war on fracking has hit a wall in court, and the oil sitting under Kern County may be the prize.
A tentative ruling from Kern County Superior Court Judge Bernard C. Barmann Jr. could reopen the door to fracking in Kern County, the New York Post reported. The decision lands two years after California formally banned the practice and five years after state regulators stopped approving fracking applications altogether.
Barmann branded the state’s prohibition on well stimulation treatments, fracking included, an “invalid underground regulation” that was “adopted without the rulemaking the Administrative Procedure Act requires.”
In other words, the regulators skipped the legally required process when they banned the practice.
“The permit denials were arbitrary and unsupported because they rested on a climate-change rationale that was not in fact the operative basis for the ban,” Barmann wrote.
The judge then went after the climate case itself. He found that the agency’s “determination that a categorical ban is reasonably necessary to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is not supported by substantial evidence and lacks a rational connection to that purpose.” He pointed to the agency’s own findings, which showed the restrictions could push global greenhouse gas emissions higher by forcing California to lean harder on imported oil.
Let that sink in. By the state’s own math, the ban sold as a climate measure could make emissions worse, not better.
Chad Hathaway, CEO of Hathaway Oil, told KGET that Kern County’s diatomite formation holds up to one billion barrels of oil that cannot be pulled out of the ground without fracking.
“The rock is too tight. So maybe we unlock a lot of production in California, actually, in Kern County, specifically, not necessarily California,” Hathaway said.
The Western States Petroleum Association cheered the decision. “We were extremely pleased to see the ruling,” association President Jodie Mueller told KGET. “We felt it was an incredibly common sense decision and recognized that hydraulic fracturing applications should be evaluated on their merits and really not blocked with a blanket denial that’s truly based on politics.”
Environmental activists are not giving up. Cesar Aguirre of the Central California Environmental Justice Network argued that SB 237, passed last year, already opens a path to as many as 2,000 new drilling permits.
“So we don’t need to remove a ban on fracking to increase production. There’s already something that exists because of SB 237,” Aguirre said, according to KGET. He claimed fracking would mainly benefit corporations squeezing oil out of aging wells.
The tentative ruling now kicks off a review process, with a final decision typically issued within 50 days, and an expected appeal could drag the battle out for years.
For now, a California judge has handed the industry the argument it has made all along: fracking permits deserve a hearing on the merits and the evidence, not “a blanket denial that’s truly based on politics.”
Source: nypost.com
