The new regulations from the Interior Department only cover federally owned land and usher in corporate disclosure requirements including over fraccing chemicals used and well location reporting to the Bureau of Land Management plus introduce post-drilling, well integrity testing if there are groundwater concerns.

Both the Independent Petroleum Association of America and Western Energy Alliance lobby groups have already launched a lawsuit against the Interior Department as they blame the Obama Administration for making "another regulatory overreach" that will hurt America's oil and gas scene.

IPAA president and CEO Barry Russell said the new mandates on fraccing were the complete opposite of common sense and said the department needed to assess the costs and how it compared to existing safeguards under state law.

"At a time when the oil and natural gas industry faces incredible cost uncertainties, these so-called baseline standards will threaten America's economic upturn, while further deterring energy development on federal lands," he said on Friday.

"Hydraulic fracturing has been conducted safely and responsibly in the United States for over 60 years. These new federal mandates will add burdensome new costs on our independent producers, taking investments away from developing new American-made energy, much-needed job creation, and economic growth."

WEA president Tim Wigley also said that states had been successfully regulating fraccing for decades, including on federal lands with "no incident that necessitates redundant federal regulation".

"BLM struggles to meet its current workload of leasing, environmental analysis, permitting, monitoring, inspecting, and otherwise administering the federal onshore oil and natural gas program," he said.

"Yet it is undertaking an entirely new regulatory regime that it has neither the resources nor the expertise to implement."

More legal action is expected.

"Other industry groups and companies are expected to follow suit," Fortune reported.