Tossing out offshore safety regs risks a new Deepwater disaster
As the United States copes with another deadly hurricane season, Americans are reminded that our oceans, providing a vast expanse for commerce, trade, seafood, energy and mineral resources and a recreation destination for millions, also hold peril. Houston is keenly aware of the risks associated with being a major port and a low lying coastal city.
With a daily barrage of alarming news, Houstonians and Gulf residents may be unaware of the implications of two closely related ocean proposals from the Trump administration. The first is a massive expansion of offshore drilling for oil and gas along the Pacific and Atlantic coasts. That unwise proposal is made still more worrisome because it’s tied to an ill-considered rollback of drilling safety requirements, including those related to blowout preventers.
Blowout preventers are the industry-standard devices that are the last line of protection to stop explosions in undersea oil and gas wells. It was a failed blowout preventer that led to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion, the worst environmental disaster in our history. It killed 11 people and resulted in 4.9 millions of barrels of oil pouring unchecked for weeks into the Gulf of Mexico, polluting shores and killing marine life. Its economic damage to the Gulf region included a $2.6 billion impact to the US fishing industry and a $23 billion blow to Gulf Coast tourism.
Following Deepwater Horizon, Executive Order 13542 established the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Spill and Offshore Drilling, a bipartisan presidential commission tasked with determining why such a spill occurred and how glaring regulatory gaps in emergency response and operational oversight could be filled. Two of our colleagues from the Joint Ocean Commission Initiative Leadership Council, Don Boesch and Francis Beinecke, served on this commission, which directly influenced the development of standards to improve offshore safety operations, including new rules to tighten controls on blowout preventers. They also added tougher requirements for the design and lining of undersea wells and for real-time monitoring of sub-sea drilling and spill containment.
Last December the Trump administration released a proposed plan to amend or remove these rules to reduce “unnecessary regulatory burdens” for oil and natural gas producers. The current proposal would remove real-time monitoring, eliminate third-party verification and essentially make reporting of equipment failures voluntary.
While it is necessary to periodically revisit regulations for efficiency and cost-effectiveness, these regulations were just put in place in 2016 and are already making substantive improvements to the safety of offshore oil and gas operations. If weakened, oil spill risk will increase, and public confidence in the safety of drilling in coastal waters will be sorely undermined.
The country might benefit from a legitimate public debate about the virtues of expanding or halting offshore drilling, especially if such a debate occurred in the context of a comprehensive national energy strategy. But there should be no question about the social contract our government has with Americans to ensure that operations in the commonwealth waters of the United States — and especially in the Gulf — be conducted in a manner that protects the health and safety of our citizens, our coastal communities and our economy.
Unlike the courageous response to the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska, when barely a year after the tragedy Congress enacted the visionary Oil Pollution Act of 1990, there was no such response from Congress regarding the Deepwater Horizon spill. We challenge the current Congress to act on the compelling recommendations from the BP Deepwater Horizon Spill commission and others and amend our laws to both learn from our mistakes and take measures that prevent their reoccurrence.
We also ask you to join us in elevating the need to maintain offshore drilling safety measures. Rolling back these measures would constitute one of the gravest errors in ocean policy history. No matter your perspective on drilling, we can all agree that it is imperative to maintain the safety standards we already have.