About EssentialRegs

Every regulation on EssentialRegs is broken into its individual provisions and presented in a browsable reader with a sidebar table of contents, the full official text, a short plain-English summary, and clickable links for every citation the section makes to another rule. When Reg 7 says “as defined in Section I.B.4,” you click it and read Section I.B.4 in place. When a Colorado rule points at 40 CFR 60, you follow the link instead of opening a second PDF and searching.

Each entry also links to the official source published by the issuing agency, because the official text is what controls. We are a reference layer on top of the regulations, not a replacement for them.

• EHS managers and safety directors who need to answer “what does the rule actually say?” several times a week without re-reading a 200-page PDF.
• Small and mid-sized operators who do not have a regulatory department and need one person to be able to find the right section fast.
• Compliance consultants who work across multiple clients and multiple rules and want one place to check applicability, thresholds, and deadlines.
• Anyone else — engineers, landmen, attorneys, students — who works with these rules and would rather navigate than scroll.

EssentialRegs was built by a founder who works in Colorado environmental compliance professionally and was tired of chasing cross-references across PDFs. The regulations that apply to a Colorado oil and gas facility are spread across federal code, state air-quality rules, and state energy-commission rules, and they cite each other constantly. Answering one question often meant having four documents open and losing track of which one you were in.

The rules are public. The problem was never access — it was navigation. EssentialRegs is the tool the founder wanted to have on the second monitor: the whole corpus, structured, linked, and summarized, so the time goes into the compliance decision instead of into finding the paragraph.

The current corpus includes:

• Colorado Regulation 3 (5 CCR 1001-5) — stationary source permitting and Air Pollutant Emission Notice requirements.
• Colorado Regulation 7 (5 CCR 1001-9) — control of ozone precursors, hydrocarbons, and greenhouse gases, including the oil and gas sections.
• Colorado Regulation 26 (5 CCR 1001-31) — greenhouse gas reporting and intensity requirements for oil and gas operations.
• 40 CFR Part 60, Subpart OOOOb — federal New Source Performance Standards for crude oil and natural gas facilities.

More is coming: additional CDPHE and ECMC rules, the federal OSHA and EPA provisions that apply to oil and gas, and county-level requirements. The Regulations page always shows what is live, and the sample page lets you inspect real entries before subscribing.

Agencies amend these rules regularly. When a regulation is revised, we re-import the current official text, regenerate the affected provisions and their cross-references, and re-run summaries for any section whose text changed. Each entry links to the official source so you can confirm the effective version yourself. We aim to reflect adopted revisions promptly, but there will be a lag between an agency’s adoption and our update — during that window the official source, not this site, controls.

The plain-English summaries are generated with the help of AI tools and reviewed by the founder on a rolling basis, starting with the sections that get the most use. Reviewed or not, a summary is an orientation aid — it tells you what a section is about so you can decide whether to read it, not what the section requires of you. Always read the regulatory text before acting on it, and if you spot a summary that is wrong or misleading, please tell us. Our full Disclaimer explains the limits of the service in more detail.

EssentialRegs is not affiliated with OSHA, EPA, ECMC, CDPHE, or any other government agency. It is funded entirely by subscriptions: no advertising, no sponsored content, and no selling of subscriber data. See the Privacy Policy for details.