“When oil and gas profits, everybody profits.”<br />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<br />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.<br />Devon was riding a tremendous boom in oil and gas production in the United States<br />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.<br />His lobbying disclosure report filed on Jan. 19 — the day before Mr. Trump was sworn in — lists<br />his lobbying work for Devon as targeting “methane emissions from oil and gas production.”<br />Ms. Rosen, the former Romney campaign worker who until late last year was Devon’s top in-house lobbyist in Washington,<br />was spotted walking into transition team meetings hosted by Mr. Trump’s advisers after the election.<br />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 —<br />and to collect more data on how much of the gas is spewing into the air.<br />Devon and Mr. Pruitt, while he was still attorney general out West, teamed up to block new federal rules imposed by the Obama administration<br />that required fossil fuel companies to more closely monitor oil and gas wells for leaks, and disclose chemicals used in hydraulic fracking.<br />rule would have required oil and gas companies, including Devon, to retrofit drilling equipment to prevent leaks of methane,<br />and other hazardous gases, from all new wells and equipment.
