The Obama administration’s decision Tuesday to end the moratorium on deep-water oil and gas drilling is good news in many respects. It will help revive the Gulf region’s economy and improve the nation’s energy-supply picture. Because it comes with stricter operating criteria for drilling, it also should improve protection against the kind of calamitous economic and environmental damage unleashed in the Gulf in the wake of BP’s disastrous well blowout on April 20.
The blowout of BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig over its Macondo well killed 11 workers, injured 17 others, and precipitated the worst offshore drilling disaster in the nation’s history. The well spewed nearly 5 million gallons of oil into the Gulf over the next four months, damaging valuable fisheries, marshes, shorelines and the Gulf states’ economies.
Though the lifting the moratorium was announced well ahead of the November 30 deadline stated earlier by the administration, it may be weeks or months before wells that were shut down, or not allowed to begin drilling, come on line.
Regardless, the new operating standards are entirely sensible and clearly needed. Indeed, their formulation begs the question of why it took such a disaster to get them on the books.
The standards tighten design criteria for drilling rigs, well and pipeline casements and equipment, and require compliance with new operating equipment and safety standards, documentation and inspection.
The new rules include standards and testing procedures specifically designed to ensure that the huge and complicated blowout preventers actually work. This is critical. Before the blowout-preventer on the Macondo well failed, blowout preventers were generally left untested and uninspected.
Blowout preventers are the 7-story-tall, concrete-enclosed stack of control tubes, valves and well shut-down equipment that should be able to effectively stop a well from becoming an unstoppable gusher in an emergency. Yet most blowout preventers, we have learned, have never been tested to see if their hydraulic-controlled pumps and ram-shears – which are supposed to cut, crimp and seal well-core pipes to prevent uncontrolled gushers – actually work in the subfreezing depths of ocean floors over a mile below ocean’s surface.
Ironically, an oil industry spokesman immediately complained about “onerous” new rules, new bureaucracy and the lack of “regulatory uncertainty” – an industry term for rules it would like to get rid of. Coming from an industry that cynically skirted safe operating rules with the abandon of test cheaters – cribbing outdated emergency procedures for Arctic drilling from each other for applications to drill in the Gulf – that’s almost unbelievable.
In fact, there is nothing uncertain about them, nor is the inspection regime unneeded or too bureaucratic.
If there is a legitimate industry complaint, it is an insufficient number of inspectors available for the pending permitting work that now needs to be done. It may take more inspectors – and a larger budget from Congress – to expedite inspections. Oil and gas companies, however, have only themselves to blame. The new rules have been discussed and posted for review for months. The industry has had plenty of time to get ready for them.
Still, it would be in the nation’s interest for Congress to expedite the administration’s request for $100 million in new funding to hire the inspectors and professional staff now needed to implement stiffer drilling standards. Jobs and a return to business normalcy in the Gulf merit the funds, and their cost can be recovered by appropriate fees from the profitable industries that will benefit from drilling permits.