State committee approves fracking rules

From the Chicago Tribune.

An obscure arm of state government cleared the way Thursday for oil and gas drillers to apply for permits to begin fracking in Illinois.

The Joint Committee on Administrative Rules moved forward without comment regulations that govern hydraulic fracturing, a controversial drilling process that injects water, chemicals and sand at high pressure into shale rock to unleash oil and gas.

The final rules remain secret. They aren’t expected to be made public until they are published in the Illinois Register. That is expected to occur by Nov. 15.

The process of writing the regulations governing fracking has been controversial. The first draft rules proposed by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources were criticized by environmentalists as being too loose in dealing with issues ranging from waste water and safety A second draft of rules was attacked by oil and gas representatives as being too restrictive; some energy companies suggested that fracking might not occur in Illinois if the rules weren’t relaxed.

Some environmentalists from Southern Illinois, where fracking most likely would occur and attended Thursday’s meeting, were not pleased the rules have been approved..

“We will resist this with our bodies, our hearts and our minds. We will block this, we will chain ourselves to trucks,” said Braze Smith, an organic farmer who traveled six hours from Union County to be at the hearing.

People downstate have been pushing for fracking because they believe it will bring tax dollars to counties, create jobs and bring money to cash-strapped landowners.

In fact, landowners in Wayne County recently filed suit against Marc Miller, director of the state Department of Natural Resources, and Gov. Pat Quinn, claiming the state’s delay in issuing fracking permits is akin to an illegal land grab.

The road to finish the fracking rules has been long and tortured.

After the law passed and the Department of Natural Resources submitted its first proposed draft rules a year ago, environmentalists were outraged. Hundreds packed hearings; some 30,000 comments were filed about the rules, many of them critical.

Afterward, the Department of Natural Resources submitted a second draft of proposed rules, which oil and gas companies said were so restrictive that they doubted companies would go forward with fracking.

“Our hope is that (the rules committee) rolled back on some of the changes made on the second draft that we think went above and beyond the statute,” said Mark Denzler, vice president of the Illinois Manufacturers’ Association and spokesman for a broad coalition of businesses that support fracking.”Their mode is questioning,” Denzler said of the committee’s role. “They push, they prod, they poke.”