Senate Democrats want the Trump administration to preserve Biden-era bonding rates and mandates to reduce harm to wildlife from oil and gas projects on public lands.
Four Democratic lawmakers penned a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and the Bureau of Land Management’s acting director, Bill Groffy, asking the administration to keep in place a 2024 BLM rule that raised bonding requirements for oil and gas leases and prioritized areas for lease that are close to existing infrastructure.
Sens. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.), Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) and Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) wrote that undoing the rule would put the onus back on taxpayers to clean up orphan wells and would increase the risk of methane leaks.
“Reversing oil and gas bonding requirements would undo the first meaningful progress in decades toward ensuring fiscal accountability for oil and gas operations on federal lands,” the lawmakers wrote.
