“Rollback!” complained environmental advocacy groups just before the US Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement issued its final rule on offshore well control. In a joint news release on May 2, Earthjustice, the League of Conservation Voters, Natural Resources Defense Council, and Wilderness Society warned that a final version approximating BSEE’s May 2018 proposed rule would “put our workers, waters, and wildlife at needless risk.” They called proposed changes to regulations adopted in April 2016, many of which the final rule implemented, “irresponsible, reckless, and wrong.”
Alluding to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the news release bore the headline “Trump rollback of offshore drilling safety protections heightens risk of another major oil disaster.” And in an expanded version of the press release, the NRDC individually griped about what it called the Department of Interior’s “overly familiar relationship with industry in these efforts.”
Familiarity essential
Three responses are in order.
The NRDC identifies no real problem in its complaint about familiarity of the Interior Department, BSEE’s parent, with the offshore oil and gas industry. It seems to think that only some official class of outsiders can oversee offshore oil and gas work. Yet no such group exists. To effectively regulate offshore operations, regulators must know offshore operations. That knowledge can come partly from a relatively few universities but mostly must flow from the industry itself. For offshore regulators, therefore, familiarity with the industry is essential and welcome.
So what’s “overly familiar?” Instead of answering that question, NRDC nags about the Interior Department’s selection of Port Fourchon as the venue for its announcement. The horror! Clearly, the group just wants to discredit BSEE with innuendo suggesting the agency is too friendly with the industry it regulates.
A subtle version of this insinuation appears where the group press release alleges that the BSEE “weakened standards for blowout preventers, merely requiring that they ‘close,’ instead of requiring that they ‘achieve an effective seal,’ a lower standard that mirrors the standard of the American Petroleum Institute.” This change from the 2016 rule corrects an inconsistency between regulation and API Standard 53 for blowout prevention equipment. API, which is accredited by the American National Standards Institute, has published more than 220 standards for offshore oil and gas operations, more than 100 since 2010. Almost half of API’s standards have been adopted in regulation.
Integration of API standards with regulation represents constructive collaboration between an industry responsive to serious mishap and its regulators. It is not cronyism. A single wording adjustment does not constitute evidence that cronyism exists.
The change, in fact, illustrates a second response to the environmental groups’ allegations of unsafe regulatory rollback: Easing regulations found to be unnecessarily strict strengthens regulation overall. The final rule, for example, newly allows operators to seek alternatives to BSEE’s default minimum drilling margin of 0.5 ppg before they apply for permission to drill. It also broadens the range of options for responding to lost circulation. The flexibility enhances safety. It also reflects compromise. Industry groups wanted to replace the prescribed drilling margin with a performance-based standard applied case by case.
BSEE said its final rule revises or adds to 71 of 342 provisions of the 2016 well-control rule. It thus does not, as NRDC said in the headline on its news release, “gut” the regulation. It improves it.
More change due
Final response: The new rule is not perfect. Experience with it will reveal new ways to meet BSEE’s objective of “encouraging energy exploration and production on the Outer Continental Shelf and reducing unnecessary regulatory burdens while ensuring that any such activity is safe and environmentally responsible.” And technology will evolve. Well-control regulation will have to change accordingly.
Offshore safety can only suffer if regulatory change meets automatic howls about “rollback” and specious suggestions that regulators defer dangerously to the regulated. No stakeholders’ group, least of all the offshore oil and gas industry, wants another Macondo.
