This is not good news.
The Interior Department is preparing to hold its first sale of offshore oil leases in the Gulf of Mexico since the Deepwater Horizon disaster last year, federal officials announced Friday.
The proposed sale, encompassing more than 20 million acres of the Western gulf, is scheduled for Dec. 14. It will be the first sale in the part of the gulf bordering Texas since the summer of 2009 and the first sale of any kind in the gulf since March 2010.
President Obama suspended leasing in the gulf after the Deepwater Horizon accident in April 2010, which killed 11 workers and spilled an estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil into the sea. He announced earlier this year that lease sales would resume later this year, but all drilling will be conducted under stricter environmental and safety regulations.
“This sale is an important step toward a secure energy future that includes safe, environmentally-sound development of our domestic energy resources,” Ken Salazar, the Interior secretary, said. “Since Deepwater Horizon, we have strengthened oversight at every stage of the oil and gas development process, including deep water drilling safety, sub sea blowout containment, and spill response capability.
How much have they strengthened oversight and how safe and environmentally sound is drilling in the Gulf going to be? How have sub sea blowout containment and spill response been strengthened exactly?
As of last April, the safety of workers, blowout preventer problems and spill response hadn't exactly been "strengthened" according to this Rachel Maddow interview with Michael Bromwich, the man heading the government agency that gives out deep water drilling permits in the Gulf of Mexico.
From that interview:
On the safety of oil workers:
MADDOW: The president stopped permits being issued because he said that we would need to be sure that this would never happen again before we started giving those permits out again. The president's oil spill commission released its report on the BP disaster. One of the things they found was that an oil rig worker was four times more likely to be killed working in U.S. waters than in European waters, even though many of the same companies operate in both areas.
Do you have any explanation for that?
BROMWICH: Do you have any explanation for what? For the higher incidence of fatalities here?
MADDOW: Yes.
BROMWICH: No. No, I don't.
MADDOW: No? And that hasn't been figured out.
BROMWICH: No.
New blowout preventer regulations:
MADDOW: The rule-making process for these new rules is going to start in the next few months which would seem to be an acknowledgement that the standards now are too lax and they need to get tougher.
If so, why give out permits now before the new rules are in place?
BROMWICH: Well, you can always improve the equipment that's being used but you -- that doesn't mean that you bring activities to a standstill until you can enhance those rules. I understand you've used the airbag metaphor in some of your program on this.
For a long time, air bags could not deal with side impacts. Did that mean that we pulled off all the cars off the road? Pending getting better airbags? No, it didn't.
That would have been a silly way to proceed. By the same token, we feel comfortable that with all the new safety regulations, the containment capabilities and the new testing and certification requirements for blowout preventers, we're in a much different and much better position now than we were back in April, even with respect to blowout preventers.
So, I think there is an insufficient basis for saying let's stop things in their tracks for the one or two years that it takes to develop better blowout preventer rules. I think that that would be a huge mistake and would be contrary to the best interests of this country.
On capping those oil spills and the response time:
MADDOW: This week, Helix revealed themselves that by their own assessment, it could take them 17 days to contain a spill. Seventeen days is the new fast response that we're supposed to feel better about in terms of containing a disaster that has already happened. That to me that doesn't feel like a great advance that would justify the type of rash issuing of permits that you've just done over the last 33 days.
BROMWICH: Well, these haven't been the rash issuance of permits, as I said. We issued none until the latter part of February. We were strongly criticized for dragging our heels on not issuing any permits for several months after the lifting of the deepwater drilling moratorium which actually lifted in October, not in February. And the reason we didn't was because the containment capabilities were not yet ready.
You're right, 17 days is not fabulous, but 17 days is a lot better than 87 days.
MADDOW: Wow.
Wow indeed.
Have any of these things been strengthened in the past four months that tell us that oil drilling offshore in the Gulf is good to go now? Somehow, I doubt that.
Meanwhile closer to home, what about the prospects of drilling offshore in Florida, should the subject come up?
If that mentioned above is all that's required to claim that offshore drilling in the Gulf is safe enough to move forward with drilling closer to our shores, there's also little doubt in my mind that a drill, baby, drill rallying cry would go out from the halls of the Capitol in Tallahassee as soon as big oil comes knocking at the door of the governor's mansion.
This is what Gov. Rick Scott had to say in response to a question on oil drilling in the Gulf during a meeting with the editorial board at the Orlando Sentinel just yesterday:
Scott said he wants to "keep the environment pristine" but wouldn't rule out near-shore drilling off Florida's beaches if "somebody can convince me" that drilling is safe. In 2009, the year before the BPaccident in the Gulf, legislative leaders introduced legislation allowing drilling a few miles off the coast, after Big Oil convinced them of drilling's safety.
Scott may be surprised to learn that Florida's beaches aren't pristine from the Deepwater Horizon spill yet. There are still plenty of tar mats and tar balls out there still to be found. Scott wouldn't know about that because his experience in the Gulf waters so far have been mostly photo ops and fishing outings. We haven't seen him digging in the sand for tar balls yet. There's also a newly discovered oil sheen in the Gulf under investigation in the past couple of days.
I'm not sure what it would take to convince Scott it's safe to drill here, but from the governor who has never met a reguation he didn't want to kill, somehow I think his safe drilling threshold would be pretty low.
Why would oil drilling regulations be any different?
