The Trump administration is overhauling how federal officials monitor safety procedures on offshore drilling operations, revising a pair of rules enacted in the wake of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill on the grounds that they are overly burdensome on industry.
Today, the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement will publish new regulations for the production-safety-systems rule, which addresses devices used during offshore oil production.
The agency also has drafted changes to another set of regulations, called the well-control rule, which aims to prevent the kind of blowout that killed 11 workers.
The Deepwater Horizon disaster, the largest oil spill in U.S. history, released more than 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. It killed thousands of dolphins, sea turtles and other marine animals, exposed hundreds of cleanup workers and other Gulf residents to toxic chemicals and prompted a six-month shutdown of all deepwater drilling in the Gulf.
Even before President Donald Trump’s election, many oil and gas officials said that the Obama administration had overreached on rules designed to forestall a future catastrophe. Those rules inhibited offshore production, they argued, and Trump administration officials reiterated that on Thursday.
“It’s time for a paradigm shift” in regulations on the outer continental shelf, which accounts for 1 in every 6 barrels of domestic oil, BSEE Director Scott Angelle said in a statement. “There was an assumption made previously that only more rules would increase safety, but ultimately it is not an either/or proposition. We can actually increase domestic energy production and increase safety and environmental protection.”
Industry leaders applauded the move.
“Safety experts in the offshore oil and gas industry now have the opportunity to comment on this important regulation,” Randall Luthi, president of the National Ocean Industries Association, said in a statement. “This ‘second bite at the apple’ provides an opportunity for further dialogue, discussion and debate to assure the Nation’s offshore energy resources are developed safely and expeditiously.”
But Michael Bromwich, who served as the first director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, said on Thursday that because both rules did not take full effect until last year, “the argument that the regulatory burden needs to be lifted … is not credible.”
While the BSEE released a copy of the production-safety rule Thursday, it has not made the well-control proposal public. A copy of the latter rule, which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, was obtained separately by The Washington Post.
In March, Trump issued an executive order instructing agencies to reduce undue burdens on domestic energy production. Angelle, who was installed by the president in May as head of the BSEE, cited that order as one of the reasons the agency decided to change the production safety rule.
Neither proposal amounts to a wholesale reversal of existing regulations, according to experts, but instead minimizes some of industry’s obligations and changes compliance terms in several instances to language favored by drillers.