Providing for Congressional Disapproval of the Rule Submitted By the Environmental Protection Agency Relating to ``Oil and Natural Gas Sector: Emission Standards for New, Reconstructed, and Modified Sources Review''

Floor Speech

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Mr. ARMSTRONG. Mr. Speaker, you can put American behind Equinor. It doesn't make it an American company. It is a Norwegian company that used to be called Statoil; now it is called Equinor that has American operations.

You can put American behind Shell. It doesn't make it an American company. It is a Dutch company who has its own legal problems in its own court that has American operations. I appreciate both of them.

At times they have done business in North Dakota; they have been great corporate citizens. You can talk about Exxon and you can talk about BP; you can talk about Shell. But let's be careful when we talk about all companies big and small that support this industry, because the one caveat with all of these companies--and this is true--the vast majority of their production does not occur onshore and most often does not even occur in the United States.

And so what does that mean? They are not subject to this CRA.

Small and medium-sized gas companies do not support this regulation. North Dakota oil and gas companies do not support this regulation. And it is not because they are interested in polluting. It is because they don't want to be duplicatively regulated from the wellhead to the market.

States are already doing this. We have heard this from New Mexico. North Dakota is regulating this. We have our industrial cushion; we have our DEQ.

But the real problem with this EPA regulation and these Obama-era policies coming back is not only its duplicative regulation, but it actually stifles innovation; because the one thing State regulators can do significantly better than the Federal Government is respond quickly--adapt. So when an industry comes to you and says, Hey, I have a way to do this better, they will work with you, they will get it done. We see it happen every day in the Oil Patch in western North Dakota.

The problem is Federal regulation at its very core is unwieldy, it is burdensome, and it gives a tremendous market share advantage to large companies over smaller companies.

We need to stop duplicative regulation. We need to allow industries to regulate and States to innovate and regulate. And we know this because we have heard it a lot. If the market is demanding, companies are going to do it. Why do we need the burdensome Federal regulation?

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