Apr. 20 was the sixth anniversary of the Macondo deepwater well blowout and oil spill. The Center for Biological Diversity marked the occasion by suing the US Department of the Interior for allegedly failing to meaningfully revise procedures for authorizing offshore oil and gas activity, including outright elimination of categorical exclusions.
DOI also is authorizing use of offshore hydraulic fracturing and other practices across the Gulf of Mexico that "increase the risk of oil spills and earthquakes, and cause toxic water and air pollution beyond that of conventional offshore oil and gas drilling," the suit filed in US District Court for the District of Columbia continued.
"Nevertheless, Interior continues to approve offshore drilling activities and rubber-stamp drilling permits with no meaningful environmental review," it asserted.
This might have come as news not just to the oil and gas industry, but also to the two DOI agencies that also were named in the action: the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the US Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement. It probably didn't since CBD was one of 47 environmental groups petitioning US President Barack Obama on Mar. 29 to stop all US Outer Continental Shelf leasing to address climate change.
The industry and its regulators hardly have been idle since that 2010 incident took 11 lives, destroyed the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, and set off a 5 million bbl oil spill that took 87 days to cap and contain and several more months to clean up.
The offshore well control regulations DOI and BSEE issued on Apr. 14 were only the latest example of actions by the federal offshore oil and gas regulators.
BSEE's offshore energy safety forum brought federal policymakers, industry, academia, and others together in May 2012 to discuss additional steps the bureau and the industry could take to continue to improve the reliability and safety of blowout preventers.
Following the forum, the agency held more than 50 meetings with industry groups, trade associations, regulators, operators, equipment manufacturers, and environmental organizations, receiving more than 5,000 pages of technical comments from 170 submitters.
The result was one of the most comprehensive offshore safety and environmental protection rules in DOI's history, BSEE Director Brian Salerno said. Several industry groups expressed concerns about aspects of the final rule, but pledged to continue working with the government on further improvements.
At the Offshore Technology Conference in Houston on May 5, the industry-supported Center for Offshore Safety will hold events to discuss all aspects of offshore safety management systems. One will feature US and Mexican offshore regulators discussing how the countries are working together in the Gulf of Mexico.
