This Sunday April 20th is the fourth anniversary of the Deepwater
Horizon explosion, which killed 11 workers and dumped over 4.9 million
barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico over a three month period in
2010.
You wouldn't think that the London-based company that spilled the oil
would get an anniversary gift from the federal government. But the
Environmental Protection Agency has just given BP a big one. The EPA
ruled that the corporation could start bidding on lucrative new oil
leases in the Gulf of Mexico after having been suspended from doing any
new business with the government ever since the accident.
That suspension was lifted on March 13th less than a week before the
yearly government auction for drilling rights. The company whose
negligence was responsible for the worst marine oil-spill in history won
43 new leases in the Gulf that is still fouled by million of gallons of
unrecovered crude.
The Deepwater Horizon disaster was not the first time that BP was
found culpable in a major accident. In 2005 the company was deemed
criminally liable for a refinery explosion in Texas City which killed 15
people. Yet again in 2006, a Justice Department investigation found
that BP had willfully ignored evidence of serious corrosion in its
pipeline, which led in Alaska to the largest oil spill ever in the
Arctic.
BP's critics say this was not just a run of bad luck, but the result
of an ingrained corporate culture which routinely put profits above
safety. In an interview, Tyson Slocum of the public interest group
Public Citizen said: "If ordinary people are found guilty in three
felony cases, they will be imprisoned-- suspension from contracts is a
kind of corporate imprisonment."
However, under intense pressure from BP, which filed a lawsuit
challenging the contract ban, and the British government, which filed a
brief in the case criticizing the US for its action, the company was
just granted a get-out-of-jail-free card by the Obama administration.
Perhaps not coincidentally, the head of the EPA suspension and
debarment office which ordered the original ban against the oil giant,
"retired" just days after the administration caved to BP's demand to end
their 5-year criminal probation period early.
After the Gulf oil spill, there were calls in the environmental
community and in Congress to reform the outdated regulatory system. "The
last time that regulations for offshore drilling were written," says
Slocum “was 1978. Deepwater wells, like the Deepwater Horizon were
introduced in 1994. So what you've got is regulations for the typewriter
age applying to IPhones."
In the aftermath of the disaster, Congress passed a bill in the
summer of 2010 which called for a comprehensive reorganization of the
Offshore Oil Agency, and for tougher new environmental standards. But,
under pressure from the American Petroleum Institute that bill died in
the Senate.
The Obama administration then took matters into its own hands calling
for a temporary moratorium on drilling. By executive decree, the
President reintroduced many of the same rules that had been included in
the ill-fated bill. These rules, however, do not have the force of law
and can be reversed by future administrations.
Moreover, the central problem, according to Slocum, remains:
"Remember, we all watched in horror over a period of two and a half
months how one of the largest and most profitable multinationals on the
planet with some of the smartest engineers in the world had absolutely
no idea how to cap that well... We still do not have clear certification
that any driller-- whether they be BP or Exxon or Shell-- has the right
equipment and the proven technology to stop a deepwater blowout."
Slocum says drillers need to be required by law to have equipment on
hand to drill a relief well in case of a future blowout. And we also
need to require companies to thoroughly test in advance critical
equipment-- like the faulty blowout protector which malfunctioned to
cause the Deepwater Horizon accident.
However, we're unlikely to get these critical regulations anytime
soon. The American Petroleum Institute has said that they will oppose
any efforts to impose new regulations on offshore drilling. One of the
wealthiest and most powerful lobbies in Washington, the API generally
gets what it asks for.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Richard Schiffman is the author of two books and a former
journalist whose work has appeared in, amongst other outlets, the New
York Times and on a variety of National Public Radio shows including
Morning Edition and All Things Considered.
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