The Obama administration is formally wrapping up its nearly two-year overhaul of the way the government oversees offshore drilling Saturday, but federal regulators say they still need more money and staff to boost inspections and step up reviews of coastal energy projects.
“We believe strongly that we need additional resources for these organizations to be able to do their job,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar told reporters today.
The plea for more money puts the Interior Department on a collision course with fiscal conservatives in Congress who are trying to pare the federal budget.
As of midnight, the agency formerly known as the Minerals Management Service _ and, for nearly a year and a half called the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement _ will be disbanded. Salazar called the achievement a “milestone” that caps nearly a year and a half of work to widely restructure the way the government polices energy development along the nation’s coasts.
In BOEMRE’s place will be two new agencies: the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) tasked with reviewing individual well proposals and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), which will administer offshore lease sales and vet broad coastal exploration plans.
BOEM will have 550 people on staff; another 750 people will be at BSEE, but that includes some workers shared by both agencies, including those in information technology and procurement departments.
The federal government has hired more than 120 people over the past 15 months, as it adds new engineers to go over drilling plans and new inspectors to visit offshore facilities. But the Obama administration has asked Congress for enough money to recruit 200 more.
Michael Bromwich, the BSEE director, has stressed that the government’s hopes of speeding up the permitting of offshore drilling projects hangs in the balance.
Congress “needs to act quickly and aggressively and give us significantly more resources than we currently have,” Bromwich said at a recent Platts Energy Podium. “We really are doing the best w can with the resources we have,” but it’s frustrating to hear lawmakers urge government to move more quickly when “we don’t have the people to speed up the process permanently.”
“I don’t have enough drilling engineers to process those drilling applications more quickly than we have been doing,” Bromwich added.
Although Bromwich has agreed to serve as the BSEE director temporarily, the Obama administration is hunting for a permanent replacement. A major challenge is finding someone who can withstand the political pressure and intense scrutiny from Congress. At least one candidate withdrew from consideration because of concerns about the congressional scrutiny.
“There are some people in this Congress who play politics with some very serious issues, and it is very important in this kind of agency to have someone who is very strong, who can call balls and strikes (and) who can tell Congress they’re wrong when they’re wrong,” Salazar said. “We need to have someone who can stand up to that kind of political questioning.”
“We do believe we have some candidates who will be able to do that,” Salazar added.
In related news:
- Salazar confirmed that an oil sheen recently spotted near the site of BP;s failed Macondo well is not from the well itself.
- Bromwich said the government has extended 1,300 oil and gas leases and denied one in response to an offshore drilling moratorium imposed after last year’s Deepwater Horizon disaster.
- Tommy Beaudreau, the BOEM director, confirmed the government would have a final decision on a sale of drilling leases in the Chukchi Sea near Alaska in accordance with a court-ordered Oct. 3 deadline. The Interior Department has to decide whether to validate the nearly 490 Chukchi leases it sold in 2008, following a successful legal challenge by conservationists and native Alaskans.
- The government is planning to sell leases in the central Gulf of Mexico next May or June. Lease sales in the Gulf were halted after the 2010 oil spill, so that the government could conduct fresh environmental assessments of the region, but a western Gulf lease sale is planned for Dec. 14. Bromwich had previously said he anticipated the central Gulf sale during the first six months of 2012 but had not been more specific.
- Beaudreau insisted the government was “on track” to roll out a new five-year plan for oil and gas leases on the outer continental shelf by the time the current 2007-2012 version expires June 30 next year. A draft proposed plan and a draft environmental impact statement are set to be issued in conjunction with that work later this fall.
Increased inspection accomplishes very little. Mostly it just does the work that the oil industry should have done. That results in them getting free work from the government. What the agency needs to do is establish good regulations and enforce them. For instance, make the oil industry provide proof that a blow out preventor for deep water drilling is properly design, tested, and certified by the agency before using it. If a blowout then occurs with that item, then shut those people down and retract any further drilling activity. A few cases like that, and you wouldn’t need federal agency “inspectors” crawling all of the place trying to find out what the oil industry has done wrong. They just don’t get it. Or is it that the agencies are actually “owned” by the oil industry and have no intention of doing anything otherwise. Go figure.