Steffy: Other countries learning Macondo’s lessons

Taken in the Gulf of Mexico more than 50 miles southeast of Venice on Louisiana's tip, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig is seen burning. A BP scientist identified a previously unreported deposit of flammable gas that could have played a role in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, but the oil giant failed to divulge the finding to government investigators for as long as a year, according to interviews and documents obtained by The Associated Press. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert, File)

Other countries are learning the lesson from BP’s 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

In recent months, offshore disasters around the globe have prompted swift and stringent response from regulators.

After a 3,000-barrel spill from a deep-water well off Rio de Janeiro in November, in which no one was killed or injured, Brazil’s environmental regulator fined the rig’s operator, Chevron, and its owner, Transocean, about $34 million. That number likely will rise because it hasn’t specified an amount for a third fine levied late last month.

It also suspended Chevron’s drilling operations in late November and denied it access to new offshore fields.

While local politics figures into the response, it shows how regulators no longer trust the industry’s reassurances that it can contain – let alone prevent – a major deep-water disaster.

Then there’s Norway. Last week, its offshore safety agency slammed BP for a platform fire in July. No one died in the accident, caused by an overheated crane motor, but an investigation by the Petroleum Safety Authority yielded some familiar findings. It determined breaches related to “lack of maintenance, deficient maintenance management, inadequacies in risk identification and deficient barrier management.”

It ordered BP to overhaul its safety practices by Feb. 1 – something BP supposedly already did after the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Both the findings of the investigation and BP’s response that it is “committed to learning from incidents such as this and to improving our performance” sound painfully familiar. The latter has been said by so many BP spokesmen so many times that it sounds more broken than BP’s safety record.

In some of the hottest oil plays around the globe, BP’s U.S. disaster has increased the burden of doubt on Western oil companies.

“What happened here is a factor,” said Jim Smith, an attorney specializing in energy issues with the Houston law firm Porter Hedges. “The industry has that much more incentive to be that much more careful. The ramifications are potentially global.”

Findings are on appeal

Meanwhile, in the U.S., BP and its associates in the Macondo project have appealed Interior Department findings that the company violated drilling regulations. The department notified BP of the violations in October, a year and a half after the accident, and issued more just last month.

Given the complexity and the magnitude of the Deepwater Horizon accident, a slower response than that of Norway or Brazil is understandable. In the meantime, though, the Interior Department lifted an industrywide moratorium on new drilling, and BP led the charge back into the Gulf. Even before it was notified of the violations, BP laid out a plan with the regulators for developing a portfolio of new deep-water wells.

U.S. regulators have steadfastly refused to consider BP’s sorry operating history, here and abroad, in considering its applications for new permits.

Instead, its moratorium treated all companies the same, and the new rules it enacted remain more prescriptive rather than the performance-based regulations adopted by Norway or Brazil.

What has BP learned?

Despite 22 deaths at its Texas City refinery since 2004, despite 11 deaths aboard the Deepwater Horizon, despite a couple hundred injured workers, and despite reciting the “lessons learned” excuse so many times it’s become a cliché, BP has failed to demonstrate that it has learned anything from its sordid history.

Instead, it’s ready to move on, to negotiate down the regulatory repercussions and resume its operations in the waters it despoiled less than two years ago.

Other countries are learning the lessons of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Are we?

Loren Steffy is the Chronicle’s business columnist. His commentary appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Contact him at loren.steffy@chron.com. His blog is at http://blogs.chron.com/lorensteffy. Follow him on his Facebook fan page and on Twitter at twitter.com/lsteffy.