Deepwater Horizon prompted new regulations. Are we safer? 

L.M. Sixel April 18, 2020  houstonchronicle.com

The explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig — and the deaths, destruction and environmental disaster it caused — spurred new rules aimed at preventing similar tragedies, protecting natural resources and reining in what was a lightly regulated industry.

But a decade later, many of those rules were rolled back under the Trump administration, which heeded complaints by the industry that the regulations were cumbersome and expensive. Some of the fundamental regulatory reforms put in place under former President Barack Obama were eliminated or weakened, including stricter standards for blowout preventers, a key piece of safety equipment that failed in the Deepwater Horizon explosion.

The relaxation of the rules, which came as the Trump administration was trying to expand oil and gas drilling off the nation’s coasts, was a victory for the offshore energy industry, which is expected to save more than $800 million in regulatory costs over 10 years. The Department of the Interior has defended the new regulations as common sense measures that reduce unnecessary burdens on offshore drillers while still protecting natural resources.

Health and safety experts, however, warn that the rollback of the Obama-era rules put the needs of business ahead of worker safety and environmental protection. Among other changes, the Trump administration reduced reporting requirements for operational failures, weakened mandates to maintain onshore monitoring stations and eliminated requirements that independent, government-certified inspectors regularly examine safety equipment.

These changes are tantamount to saying, “Eh, it’s not going to happen again,” said Victor B. Flatt, an environmental law professor at the University of Houston.

“But,” Flatt added, “that is what we had before.”

Celebration to tragedy

The Deepwater Horizon platform was built in 2001. It was owned by the Swiss drilling contractor Transocean, which in turn leased it to the British oil major BP in the Gulf of Mexico.

On April 20, 2010, there was cause for celebration. Managers of BP and Transocean gathered on the rig platform to celebrate seven years without a lost-time injury. Three days earlier, the rig had finished drilling the Macondo well; crews were getting ready to begin commercial production.

That night, Deepwater Horizon exploded and sank after both the cement plug intended to cap the flow of oil and blowout preventer that was supposed to control the flow of high pressure oil and natural gas failed. A surge of natural gas rushed up the drill pipe to the surface, where it ignited.

Eleven workers were killed. Some 3.2 million barrels of oil spewed into the Gulf of Mexico over 87 days, fouling Gulf waters, beaches and marshes and killing birds, mammals and marine life.

Once the well was capped, investigators worked to figure out what happened and how it could be prevented from happening again.

Widespread problems in the offshore industry and the agency meant to regulate it, the Minerals Management Service, had been identified a decade before Deepwater Horizon. In 2008, the Interior Department’s Inspector General published a report on the Minerals Management Service, detailing a culture of corruption in an agency that let industry have its way.

The IG report found that oil industry representatives were allowed to fill out their own safety inspection reports. Regulators were given meals, tickets to sporting events and gifts from oil industry employees, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court in California by several environmental groups. Government inspectors were negotiating for energy consulting work with the very companies they were inspecting.

The investigation into Deepwater Horizon uncovered additional problems, including equipment design failures and poor drilling practices that were allowed to continue with little or no oversight.

Several other investigations were launched by government agencies including the U.S. Coast Guard and Minerals Management Service and by industry groups such as the National Academy of Engineering. A month after the explosion, Obama signed an executive order to form a bipartisan national commission that would focus on the root cause of the disaster.

Their reports and other studies found a lack of government oversight, a lackadaisical attitude about safety among drillers, and last-minute drilling changes.

“It was a wake-up call to the federal government that more needed to be done to monitor what was happening out in the field,” said Stella Pulman, an environmental lawyer with the Pillsbury law firm in Houston who represents energy clients.

New agency

In the wake of Deepwater Horizon, a new agency was created — the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement — to oversee the offshore industry. In 2016, the agency issued a new well control rule that set specific drilling margin parameters so pressure created by drilling fluids don’t cause fractures in the well — the source of the gas leak that caused the explosion — and required periodic third-party inspections of blowout preventers to prevent avert failures.

Deepwater Horizon also spurred the oil industry to re-evaluate its practices. The American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s biggest and most influential trade group, set up task forces to examine underwater oil control and containment, offshore operating facilities and offshore equipment. The industry set new standards and updated existing ones including safer designs of deep-water well construction and safe transfer of work duties between onsite managers and contractors.

It also established a center for offshore safety so industry members could report accidents and near misses as a way to identify root causes to the problems and improve safety, said Debra Phillips, senior vice president of global industry services for API. The industry trade group embraced third-party oversight.

“We do believe there has been good change over the past 10 years on both the regulatory side and on voluntary industry action and standard setting,” she said.

But the industry believed rules imposed by the Obama administration were too cumbersome. One required oil companies to hire independent auditors to examine blowout preventers and other equipment. But the auditors had to be selected from a government approved list — even though the list was never developed, Phillips said.

The industry, meanwhile, was already using independent auditors.

Last year, the Trump administration rescinded many of the new regulations, a move government officials said would save the energy industry about $824 million over the next decade.

“The rule eliminates unnecessary regulatory burdens while maintaining safety and environmental protection offshore,” Interior Secretary David Bernhardt said in a statement.

Fading legacy

The tragedy and its images — the platform aflame, beaches fouled, dying birds and mammals covered in black crude, a well spewing oil for nearly three months — remain scarred in the memory of the nation.

But despite the magnitude of the accident, the public reaction to the Deepwater Horizon tragedy doesn’t seem to have generated long-lasting changes, at least compared to another environmental disaster two decades earlier. The 250,000 barrels of oil that spilled into pristine waters and beaches when the oil tanker Exxon Valdez struck a reef in Prince William Sound in Alaska in 1989 spurred tighter federal and state regulations.

Congress passed the Oil Pollution Act a year after the spill, requiring tankers to have double hulls to provide an additional layer of protection. The governor of Alaska ordered tugboat escorts for every loaded tanker.

A year after struggling to recover from the Deepwater Horizon, the nation’s worst oil spill and one of the deadliest oil industry accidents, Congress created a new federal agency, the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement.

But other measures went nowhere. A bill to improve rig worker safety and remove liability caps so drillers would be responsible for paying the entire cost of economic damages caused by oil spills died in Congress.

After passing the House, Gulf Coast lawmakers stopped the bill in the Senate, arguing it could hurt the oil and gas industry on which the region’s economy depends, said Athan Manuel, director of the land protection program for the environmental advocacy group Sierra Club.

“It’s a really sad lesson that we did not learn,” Manuel said. “We’re 10 years out but we’re still in the same place essentially.”