RSS Feed MenuThink of the Interior Department’s new offshore drilling rules as a product recall.
Recalls are initiated when something is wrong with a company’s product and that something needs fixing sooner rather than later.
The blowout of BP’s Macondo well and the consequent spill of some 4.9 million barrels of oil is a sign that something is wrong with deepwater oil production and it needs fixing.
Until that something is fixed, it wouldn’t be prudent to continue stamping out drilling permits at the express checkout line that the bureaucrats call “categorical exclusion.”
A categorical exclusion is a determination that a project won’t have much of an environmental impact and can go ahead without a detailed assessment.
Before the Macondo well popped its cork, the Interior Department agency formerly known as the Minerals Management Service was cranking out deepwater drilling permits under categorical exclusions about as fast as the paperwork could be stamped. Macondo was the beneficiary of one of those exclusions.
On Monday, Interior announced it plans to hold off giving such exclusions for deepwater drilling permits until it figures out a new game plan for overseeing offshore oil production. That figuring out will run parallel to ongoing probes into causes of the big spill.
Sure, it all sounds like a bureaucratic grind, and it’s not to the liking of an impatient deepwater oil industry that is accustomed to deferential treatment by friendly regulators.
Excessive deference is no longer appropriate and deepwater drilling permits that get little more than a lick and a promise from the permit writers will no longer do. The Macondo spill and the 2009 blowout in the Timor Sea are worrisome signs that deepwater well control problems are more difficult than the industry has let on, and its assurances of adequate spill control capability are less credible than the industry would have the public believe.
The federal government’s job is to make sure that companies privileged to produce oil and gas in America’s marine waters respect the responsibility that accompanies that privilege. The consequences of corner cutting, sloppy practices and inadequate spill response capability are too great—ask any of the Gulf Coast communities suffering from a lost summer in the fishing and tourism industries.
The industry is moaning that delays in putting its rigs and crews to sea again will result in costly delays. Like manufacturers forced into product recalls, they’d rather be on the market moving product than pulling back for do-overs.
C’est la vie. Better to be responsibly safe than sorry with screw-ups that kill people and pollute the ocean. Whatever went wrong a mile below must be identified and steps taken to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
DonkeyEdge // Aug 19, 2010 at 9:22 am
Bravo!
“Better to be responsibly safe than sorry with screw-ups that kill people and pollute the ocean”. I couldn’t agree more. And I think that should apply to the toxic dispersant, Corexit 9500, too. This is what a corexit “burn” looks like:
http://thedonkeyedge.com/2010/07/30/breaking-thousands-in-gulf-suffer-from-misdiagnosed-skin-lesions/
sinz54 // Aug 19, 2010 at 9:30 am
I agree.
I was an engineer in my younger, healthier days.
If the system you’re building can’t be shown to be reasonably safe, then you shut down. You wait until you can figure out how it can be made safe, and only then you restart.
How many more examples do we need?
The zeppelin Hindenburg.
The Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse.
The Apollo 1 fire.
The Space Shuttle Challenger.
oldgal // Aug 19, 2010 at 11:17 am
Until the oil industry has viable disaster recovery plans no further permits should be issued. Unfortunately, most industries do the bare minimum to satisfy disaster recovery requirements.
medinnus // Aug 19, 2010 at 11:29 am
Fortunately for the GOP puppets of Big Oil, its the Democrats who get to do this; then when the GOP gets back into office (a historical inevitability) they can earn their graft by repealing it and reinstating the ‘rubber stamp’ policies.
balconesfault // Aug 19, 2010 at 12:21 pm
Until that something is fixed, it wouldn’t be prudent to continue stamping out drilling permits at the express checkout line that the bureaucrats call “categorical exclusion.”
Bingo.
Our bureaucracy is always accused of “over-regulating” until the next big accident occurs. For example, in the pipeline industry it was the Bellingham disaster – for decades the DOT had allowed pipeline operators to build hazardous liquids lines anywhere, with barely the barest of bones criteria for siting and safety (interstate gas pipelines for various reasons were regulated by FERC, which has always had much more stringent review standards). After Bellingham the DOT finally created a comprehensive set of regulations for requiring more rigorous pipeline safety inspection and repair programs based on the potential for significant disaster from a release (contaminated drinking waters, or explosions in densely populated areas – those kind of things).
Without Bellingham, it’s quite possible that the requirements for a comprehensive integrity management planning process for liquids pipelines might still be regarded as a potential bureaucratic overreach, another thing that whackjob environmentalists and kneejerk statists want to impose on industry … which of course “has every interest in keeping their product safely in their lines, and thus needs no further oversight”.
Or so they say, until the next rubber stamped project explodes or leaks or whatever because forseeable consequences were ignored as too unlikely to worry about.
forkboy1965 // Aug 19, 2010 at 1:40 pm
The multitude of Federal law and agencies that have come to into existence over the decades to regulate industries (such as oil, aviation, etc.) did not leap into existence in a vacuum. They came about because business, when left to its devices, will do whatever it can to keep costs low and if they can get away with it, do something that creates unreasonable risk to the environment and/or people.
The notion that we can leave business to regulate itself has shown itself to be naive at best. The continual push by most in the GOP to let market forces dictate matters has proven itself a foolish and irresponsible direction.
balconesfault // Aug 19, 2010 at 2:14 pm
The notion that we can leave business to regulate itself has shown itself to be naive at best.
And utterly cynical when paired for the other great GOP crusade – tort reform. In the absence of a strong regulatory structure, the primary tool left to compel business to factor human health and environmental risks into their decision-making is the threat of ruinous settlement costs.
In a world where citizens ability to seek redress through the legal system becomes substantially hampered by “tort reform”, paired with the increased use of LLC subsidiaries by large corporations so that they can wash their hands and walk away from problems more easily, the financial benefits of reducing costs by creating (what we would call) “unreasonable risk” are too attractive for many corporations focussed on maximizing “return to shareholders” to ignore.
glennd1 // Aug 19, 2010 at 6:15 pm
Why do you use the idiotic term ‘Big Oil’ in this article? It’s the kind of idiotic word games that the left plays.