“When oil and gas profits, everybody profits.”
The invitation to lunch at the towering new Devon Energy Center in downtown Oklahoma City came to Mr. Pruitt in June 2012 — 18 months into his tenure
as Oklahoma’s top law enforcement official — from Larry Nichols, a co-founder of what had become the city’s biggest independent oil and gas company.
Devon was riding a tremendous boom in oil and gas production in the United States
that was fueled by the revolutionary new technologies that it had helped establish, like so-called coal-bed natural gas, which uses advanced drilling techniques to extract methane gas from underground coal deposits.
His lobbying disclosure report filed on Jan. 19 — the day before Mr. Trump was sworn in — lists
his lobbying work for Devon as targeting “methane emissions from oil and gas production.”
Ms. Rosen, the former Romney campaign worker who until late last year was Devon’s top in-house lobbyist in Washington,
was spotted walking into transition team meetings hosted by Mr. Trump’s advisers after the election.
postponed a long-planned rule requiring companies like Devon to retrofit drilling equipment to prevent leaks of methane gas — a major contributor to climate change —
and to collect more data on how much of the gas is spewing into the air.
Devon and Mr. Pruitt, while he was still attorney general out West, teamed up to block new federal rules imposed by the Obama administration
that required fossil fuel companies to more closely monitor oil and gas wells for leaks, and disclose chemicals used in hydraulic fracking.
rule would have required oil and gas companies, including Devon, to retrofit drilling equipment to prevent leaks of methane,
and other hazardous gases, from all new wells and equipment.