Abstract
State Review of Oil and Natural Gas Environmental Regulations, Inc. (STRONGER) was formed in 1999 as a non-profit, multi-stakeholder organization to reinvigorate and carry forward the State Review Process, begun cooperatively by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission (IOGCC) in 1988. The State Review Process is unique in federal environmental regulation. Rather than develop a traditional prescriptive, command-and-control federal regulatory program, the EPA enabled the states, the regulated community and other stakeholders to develop, through consensus, a set of state oil and gas regulatory program guidelines, and a process for evaluating state oil and gas regulatory programs against the guidelines.