After the horse has bolted

The phrase ‘after the horse has bolted’ certainly rings true when considering the US administration’s announcement that it will require an environmental assessment for any future deep-water offshore drilling.

Ken Salazar, US Interior Secretary, said: ‘In light of the increasing levels of complexity and risk - and the consequent potential environmental impacts - associated with deep-water drilling, we are taking a fresh look at the process and the types of environmental reviews that should be required for offshore activity. Our decision-making must be fully informed by an understanding of the potential environmental consequences of federal actions permitting offshore oil and gas development.’

Which is a very cute way of stating that various US administrations have messed up in the most catastrophic way possible. The US Council on Environmental Quality has released a report suggesting a review of the process where the US Department of the Interior gives ‘categorical exemptions’ (CEs) for environmental assessments in deep-water drilling projects.

The report states: ‘The CEs used by the agency for the approval of the BP Exploration Plan [relating to the Gulf of Mexico] and the approval of the Applications for Permit to Drill (APD) for the Macondo well were established in 1981 and 1986, before deepwater drilling became widespread.’ Thus, the exemption given to BP was based on a wholly outdated and irrelevant set of criteria.

In May 2000, the US Interior’s Minerals Management Service produced a Gulf of Mexico Deepwater Operations and Activities Environmental Assessment (Deepwater EA) that, according to the report detailed above, ’included an assessment of what was then known about deepwater operations and activities’. The decision document that finalised the Deepwater EA (and here the Council on Environmental Quality report quotes directly from this decision document) said that ‘the accidental subsea release of oil is a very low-probability event’. Unfortunately, this was one ‘very low-probability event’ that came to pass.

All this does shed some light on the sometimes bellicose response of the US administration to BP since the oil spill. One can sense a certain amount of blame-shifting going on. Whatever BP’s faults it is clear that US authorities didn’t have the oversight in place to counter those fault-lines.

Lyndon White
Editor, Processingtalk

Lyndon’s comments form part of the weekly Processingtalk newsletter, which also includes a round-up of the latest processing products and services. To subscribe click here