New Texas Law Bans Cities From Banning

New Texas Law Bans Cities From Banning Fracking. Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has signed into law a prohibition on cities and towns imposing local ordinances preventing fracking and other potentially environmentally harmful oil and natural gas activities.

The much-watched measure sailed through the GOP-controlled Legislature after voters in Denton, a university town near Dallas, banned hydraulic fracturing locally in November.

The new law limits not only the Denton ban but other actions communities could take limiting energy industry activities. It was backed by oil and gas concerns. New Texas Law Bans Cities From Banning Fracking

Abbott said Monday he was protecting private property rights from the “heavy hand of local regulation.”

He saw no contradiction in new state regulations superseding local voters’ will, saying he believes “individuals have a much better idea how to run their own lives than do a bunch of government officials.”Hydraulic fracturing, also called fracking, fracing, hydrofracking, fraccing, frac’ing, and hydrofracturing, is a well stimulation technique involving the fracturing of bedrock formations by a pressurized liquid. The process involves the high-pressure injection of “fracking fluid” (primarily water, containing sand or other proppants suspended with the aid of thickening agents) into a wellbore to create cracks in the deep-rock formations through which natural gas, petroleum, and brine will flow more freely. When the hydraulic pressure is removed from the well, small grains of hydraulic fracturing proppants (either sand or aluminium oxide) hold the fractures open.

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