By Amy Harder And Russell Gold
WASHINGTON--The Obama administration is expected to propose in
the coming days an offshore oil and natural gas drilling regulation
aimed at preventing the kind of explosion that erupted five years
ago on BP's Deepwater Horizon rig, killing 11 people and causing
the biggest offshore oil spill in U.S. history.
The Interior Department draft rule, which has long been expected
by the industry, would impose tougher standards on that blowout
preventers, which are designed to seal off oil wells in
emergencies. This equipment failed in the April 2010 disaster,
which helped lead to the explosion on the BP rig in the Gulf of
Mexico.
An Interior Department spokeswoman on Saturday wouldn't say when
the administration would issue the rule. But oil-industry officials
say it could come imminently.
The spokeswoman said the department has issued two major
regulations on drilling safety since 2010, including tougher
requirements on well casings and cementing practices of wells. She
stressed the latest rule would be a continuation of the
administration's policy response to the spill.
Environmentalists have pushed for Congress to pass legislation
in response to the oil spill, hoping lawmakers would embed tougher
standards into law, making them more difficult to undo. In the
years since the oil spill, however, legislative efforts have broken
down over a number of issues, particularly the degree to which oil
companies should be held liable for damage from such spills.
the New York Times first reported the regulation's imminent
announcement on Saturday.
The new federal rules are focused on the blowout preventer, a
several-story tall set of valves that typically sit on the ocean
floor and are designed to sever the well and shut it down in case
of an emergency. In 2010, the blowout preventer failed to work as
expected, leaving a gushing well on the bottom of the Gulf of
Mexico.
In 2011, engineers working for federal investigators probing the
Deepwater catastrophe, said the emergency shut-off valves partially
closed. However these valves came within 1.4 inches of sealing the
well--but remained open, allowing crude oil to escape.
Later, a different federal investigation by the Chemical Safety
Board concluded the pipe running from the floating drilling
platform to the subsea oil well buckled, making it impossible for
the blowout preventer to cut it and seal off the well. Last year, a
member of the investigation said pipe buckling could render even
the best maintained blowout preventers unable to shut down a well
in an emergency.
The failure of the blowout preventer has been one focus of
investigators, but the investigations into Deepwater Horizon
incident found many systemic problems, from poorly designed blowout
preventers to poor choices by workers aboard the drilling rig and
government oversight that was too close to the offshore drilling
industry.
Write to Amy Harder at amy.harder@wsj.com and Russell Gold at
russell.gold@wsj.com
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