Legal regulation of environmental protection and ensuring environmental safety when using underground resources at regional and local levels

The article deals with environmental and legal problems of using underground resources, particularly associated petroleum gas. Today regional legislation develops unsystematically and inconsistently, because the powers of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation are regulated insufficiently in the sphere of environmental protection and ensuring environmental safety, when using underground resources. Some cases contain direct contradictions to federal legislation. Some constituent entities of the Russian Federation have a tendency for normative legal regulation of this area of public relations within the framework of "advanced standard-setting". These tendencies show the need to specify the powers of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation in federal legislation. Disposal of associated petroleum gas is becoming a serious problem today. A great part of this gas is wildly flared getting into the atmosphere, whereas there is a more decent and even profitable way of its disposal. The article analyzes the corporate structure of associated petroleum gas production in Russia and determines the directions for improving the legal framework. Based on their research, the authors propose to develop a Program of implementing a set of measures aimed at increasing the extraction and subsequent processing (disposal) of associated petroleum gas by independent oil companies, which could serve as measures for state stimulation of oil production development