Two courts have rejected the Obama administration’s first attempt to ban deep-water oil drilling in the Gulf pending safety reviews to prevent another spill. Fortunately, the administration is taking the safety issue more seriously than the courts.
It issued revised rules Monday for a new six-month moratorium on deep-water drilling, setting conditions that would allow some companies to resume drilling under reasonable safety criteria that should be the industry standard. That should satisfy drilling companies, but it doesn’t.
Their continuing objections are hard to fathom. Indeed, they effectively demonstrate precisely why BP still has an uncapped gusher fouling Gulf shores and fisheries from Texas to Florida, and why other drillers cannot be assumed to be operating safely.
Under the new moratorium, drilling companies may qualify for permission to keep drilling if they meet three clear and reasonable conditions:
* They must prove they have adequate plans to quickly shut down a well in the event of an out-of-control stream of oil from the well.
* They must show that the blow-out preventer on top of the well on the ocean floor has passed stiff new tests to verify its operational safety.
* They must have sufficient clean-up capacity and resources in the event of a spill.
Those basic criteria for drilling should be mandatory. They should have been in place before the BP spill. But as we have learned through congressional hearings, the drilling industry in the Gulf had rarely been required to meet such real-life criteria.
In fact, recent congressional hearings showed that BP and the four other major oil and gas companies operating in the Gulf had presented safety plans to the government’s inept Minerals and Management Services that seemed like virtual copies of each other’s plans, even though their drilling methods differed. All five cited identical Arctic-based response plans, the same ineffective equipment and presumed response capacity, what they would do to aid walruses and other Arctic sea life, and listed the same telephone number for the same deceased expert.
Ed Markey, chairman of the House Energy Committee, said the plans were on different colored paper but contained 90 percent of the same wording. His hearings also revealed that many drillers had not had their blow-out preventers tested and certified.
That is astonishing. These complex, 5-story contraptions rely on a serious of hydraulic valves to drive the all-important ram-shear cutters which, in a crisis, are supposed to be capable of cutting and simultaneously crimping and sealing the drill pipe, a thick, wide pipe that contains a high-pressure gusher of oil and that takes immense mechanical pressure to close.
BP’s ram-shear failed. It’s blow-out preventer failed more generally because BP ordered Transocean’s drilling rig operator to substitute lighter sea-water for heavier oils when the rig was trying to shut down the well by injecting it with fluids, to be followed by cement. BP’s blow-out preventer also lacked an acoustical pressure signal to activate the ram-shear. Its drill pipe was also lighter duty: a single metal sleeve rather than a double-cased pipe with a cement filler.
For all these reasons, the administration would be foolish to allow deep-water drilling to continue without verifying that drilling companies are meeting reasonable safety standards.
The Obama administration is right to continue keeping a moratorium in place. If it didn’t, and another blow-out occurred, the administration would be condemned from every corner of the nation for inexplicable laxity and incompetence.
The moratorium, to be sure, does deepen the damage to Louisiana’s economy. The drilling industry supplies thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in economic activity and crucial tax revenue. The lull in this industry is clearly painful.
But the industry itself, and state regulators as well as federal regulators, share blame for the current disaster. Though they argue against regulation, the oil and gas industry and the drilling companies they employ all share responsibility for operating practices that have now proved to be broken. If they cannot now show they are operating safely, they should not be allowed to operate.