Economic Analysis of Proposed Effluent Limitations Guidelines and Standards for Synthetic-Based Drilling Fluids and other Non-Aqueous Drilling Fluids in the Oil and Gas Extraction Point Source Category

This report is divided into seven sections. Following this introduction, Section Two presents sources of data, Section Three presents the industry profile, Section Four discusses the regulatory costs of options under consideration for the proposed rulemaking, and Section Five discusses the impacts of the proposed rule on firms, well drilling, and production, and also briefly discusses secondary impacts such as those on employment, output, inflation, balance of trade and other industries. Section Six presents EPA's initial regulatory flexibility analysis as required under the Regulatory Flexibility Act (RFA) as amended by the Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act (SBREFA). Section Seven provides a brief summary of costs and benefits of the rule. Finally Appendix A documents how the per-well incremental costs were derived from EPA's engineering cost estimates, and Appendix B presents numbers of wells estimated to be drilled annually by potentially affected firms and the resulting compliance costs associated with those firms.