As the effects of the worst accidental offshore spill in world history still are being uncovered around the Gulf and in its communities and ecosystems, the offshore drilling industry is back to full steam, with as many rigs drilling in deep water in the Gulf as there were two years ago. It’s been just over a year and a half since the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Have we forgotten about offshore safety?
The government and drilling industry have pointed to new safety measures implemented by the former Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE). Little analysis has been done assessing these new measures, though insiders insist that their new measures make offshore drilling much safer.
Last week OCEANA got their hands on BOEMRE’s new “safety measures” and performed their own analysis which examined how effective they will be in preventing future spills and improving offshore safety. In doing so, OCEANA systemically looked at what went wrong leading up to the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
OCEANA concluded that the new safety measures cannot guarantee against future spills, and furthermore likely would not have prevented the BP spill from occurring. The result was that the new safety measures are undermined by two factors: overarching problems in offshore regulation and flaws in the safety measures themselves.
Here are a few of the problems that the new safety measures do NOT address:
• Perverse financial incentives encourage corner-cutting and saving time at the expense of safety.
• Blowout preventers, one of which memorably failed to stop the Deepwater Horizon blowout, have critical deficiencies that make it more likely they will not be able to prevent blowouts.
• The government’s inspection and oversight capabilities are woefully inadequate to ensure that companies follow the rules and operate in a safe manner.
• The offshore industry’s culture of prioritizing profits over safety has not substantively changed.
And the flaws in the safety measures themselves include:
• New safety measures that address testing and maintenance won’t work because there is inadequate inspection and oversight by the government to ensure companies abide by them.
• The American Petroleum Institute, which lobbies on behalf of the offshore oil and gas industry, is allowed to license independent third parties that are supposed to verify some of the new safety measures. This is a clear conflict of interest and undermines those safety measures.
• New regulations that require two additional independent barriers to be installed in wells so as to help protect against blowouts are severely flawed, as they allow dual safety valves, which are widely known to not be effective barriers, to qualify as barriers.
The new safety measures can be declared as a way to solve a never ending problem, but in retrospect it may be uncovered as a tool to delay a more needed investigation.
Category: Offshore Oil Rig Accident
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