The Obama administration unveiled the first major national safety restrictions for fracking on Friday, touching off a swift backlash from the president’s critics in Congress and the energy industry.

Two oil industry groups immediately sued to challenge the rules, calling them “a reaction to unsubstantiated concerns,” while 27 Senate Republicans introduced legislation to block them from taking effect. Meanwhile, green groups were divided on whether the long-awaited regulations go far enough.


“The political reaction is not surprising,” Interior Secretary Sally Jewell told reporters Friday after her department released the finished rules. But she added, “We’re confident from the process we went through that we’re doing the right thing for the American people.”

The new rules are the federal government’s most comprehensive foray to date toward regulating the technology at the heart of the U.S. oil and gas boom, addressing worries such as potential dangers to drinking water. They also offered oil and gas supporters new room to accuse President Barack Obama of seeking to throttle fossil-fuel production, despite his repeated boasts about the nation’s booming energy supplies.

At the same time, the rules fall short of environmentalists’ biggest demands for oversight of fracking operations — let alone some groups’ calls for an all-out ban.

Interior’s regulations apply only to land owned by the federal government or Indian tribes, so they won’t end the current patchwork of state laws and local ordinances governing the practice in hot spots like Pennsylvania, south Texas and North Dakota. But the industry and its supporters in Congress still call it an overreach, arguing that greens are massively exaggerating the dangers and that states are adequately regulating the industry already.

“If Interior was half as interested in new production as it is in new regulation, our nation would be in a far better place,” said Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who chairs the Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

Erik Milito, the American Petroleum Institute’s upstream operations director, issued a statement Friday that the rules threaten to create a “duplicative layer of new federal regulation.” He added: “Despite the renaissance on state and private lands, energy production on federal lands has fallen, and this rule is just one more barrier to growth.”

Two other industry groups — the Independent Petroleum Association of America and the Western Energy Alliance — swiftly filed a federal lawsuit Friday in Wyoming attacking the rules. Senate Republicans, including Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, didn’t even wait for the rule to come out before filing their hostile legislation late Thursday.

On the other side of the aisle, top House Natural Resources Committee Democrat Raúl Grijalva lamented that the rules represent “the lowest common denominator.”

“Instead of offering clarity and protecting our resources, today’s rule lets industry off the hook,” the Arizona Democrat said.

Still, the liberal Center for American Progress says the regulations are an important step.

“As with any rule, you can’t please everyone and you can’t make it perfect, but the rule will absolutely be a huge leap forward toward safer wells, improved transparency, and better protections for nearby communities,” Matt Lee-Ashley, director of the group’s public lands project, said by email.

Jewell said the rules are long overdue.

“Current federal well-drilling regulations are more than 30 years old and they simply have not kept pace with the technical complexities of today’s hydraulic fracturing operations,” she said in a statement. “This updated and strengthened rule provides a framework of safeguards and disclosure protocols that will allow for the continued responsible development of our federal oil and gas resources.”

The debate touches on some of the most dominant energy issues of Obama’s presidency. Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing — which involves injecting water, sand and chemicals underground to break up oil- and gas-rich shale formations — has helped create boom towns in once-unlikely states while turning the U.S. into a rising energy superpower.

The resulting surge in domestic supplies during the past eight years has helped drive a swoon in oil and gas prices, putting money into consumers’ pockets and strengthening the United States’ hand against rival energy producers like Iran and Russia. But it has also weakened the bottom lines of many oil and gas producers, making them vulnerable to what Dan Naatz, a senior vice president at the Independent Petroleum Association of America, described as a regulatory “death by a thousand cuts.”

Kathleen Sgamma, a vice president at the industry group Western Energy Alliance, agreed that the withering downturn in oil prices “strengthens their hand” at Interior.

“The industry is weaker and won’t be able to fight back,” she said in an interview about the upcoming fracking regulations. “If they’re out on public lands where [drilling activity] is already more marginal, this is blood in the water.”

Anti-fracking activists had denounced an earlier draft from Interior as too weak, saying the president should do more to tamp down oil and gas production amid worries about illnesses, damaged roads, explosive fuel trains and even earthquakes, which some scientists suspect have been triggered by underground disposal of drilling waste.

Amy Mall, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said her group would stay worried about fracking’s effects on pollution and public health “even if this rule were absolutely perfect, the strongest it could be, with rigorous penalties for noncompliance.”

“Because none of those rules are strong enough and enforced enough,” she added, and “because we’re very concerned about how much oil and gas BLM is permitting and the process they’re using.”

Interior is expected to follow up in the next few months with new standards for the burning of fracking-generated methane gas, which can contribute to global warming. And the Environmental Protection Agency, which has taken its own steps to limit methane pollution from shale gas wells, is still working on a years-long study of fracking’s health risks. That study could lead to even broader attempts at regulation, including on the private or state-owned lands where the vast majority of fracking occurs.

The rules released Friday will have an especially large impact in the West, where drillers on federal and tribal lands will have to abide by new standards for well construction and the management of fracking waste fluids. And they will apply to both oil and gas production, unlike an EPA air rule that took effect this year for gas wells only.

The new Interior regulations include standards for well construction, responding to worries about fracking fluids being able to seep into nearby drinking water supplies. In one setback for the companies, regulators will vet the construction of individual wells, as opposed to allowing the industry to offer “type wells” as stand-ins for a larger group.

In addition, the rules say liquid wastes generated during the fracking process must be stored in sealed tanks rather than in open pits.

The regulations also require drillers to disclose the chemicals they inject underground within 30 days after fracking is completed. And the rules add hoops for companies to jump through before they can keep the chemicals confidential as trade secrets. Environmentalists objected to any trade-secret exemptions and grumbled about Interior’s reliance on an industry-backed website called FracFocus for making the data available to the public.

Instead of tightening the screws, Naatz said, the federal government should ease its regulations. “Our members will say the very same activity you’re seeing on state and private lands could be happening on federal land,” he said.

The Interior proposal has had a long, rocky road to the finish line.

BLM originally said the rule would be final by the end of 2012, but then withdrew its proposal in January 2013 before issuing a new proposal four months later. Environmentalists complained that Interior appeared to be backsliding amid heavy pressure from industry.

Congressional Democrats did not wait for Interior to finish its fracking rule before firing off their own efforts to rein in oil and gas development. Environmentalists cheered Thursday’s introduction of five House bills on the topic, including a proposal to close the so-called Halliburton loophole, a 2005 amendment that prohibits EPA from regulating most fracking activity under the Safe Drinking Water Act. Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) has also reintroduced that bill in the Senate.

Andrew Restuccia contributed to this report.