Texas Railroad Commission

Texas’s main oil regulator has been prohibited from waiving environmental rules and fees, measures adopted to help drillers cope with the pandemic-driven slump in crude prices.

Commissioners approved a revamped form that will be used by oil and gas operators to apply for an exception to flare gas during oil and gas operations. The form provides specific guidance on when an exception to flare would be permissible, under which circumstances, and for how long.

The Texas Railroad Commission’s chairman has said the commission will look into policies to “drastically reduce” natural gas flaring from the state’s shale patch as investors become increasingly sensitive to climate-change concerns.

Recommendations include changes to current forms and reports used to track flaring.

The Texas Railroad Commission finally ended its uncomfortable flirtation with limiting production by declining to set quotas, but it changed rules to speed oil storage construction and allow companies to conserve cash by giving them more time to plug wells and clean up waste pits.

Texas Railroad commissioners recognize the battering Texas oil companies, and their workers, are taking, but will continue considering their options until 5 May.

Even some free-market advocates are calling for regulators to step in and try to help pull them out of what feels like a chasm by setting production limits.

The notion that the state of Texas could help oil producers by limiting production at a time when the market is glutted has a real history in Texas, but an iffy future.

Texas regulators rejected a rare challenge to gas flaring in the state after an oil company argued that a flaring ban would force it to shut in wells, damaging the reservoir and reducing future oil production.

The Texas Supreme Court ruled late in April that the Railroad Commission of Texas, the state’s oil and gas regulator, does not have exclusive jurisdiction over environmental contamination cases, which can be settled in court.