NEW ORLEANS – Ahead of Saturday’s ninth anniversary of the deadly Deepwater Horizon explosion and BP oil spill, an analysis from an international environmental group warned that moves by President Donald Trump’s administration are weakening offshore safety and creating a “recipe for disaster.”
Oceana released the report early Thursday, contending that oversight of the oil and gas industry has returned to pre-BP levels, when the U.S. Department of Interior relied too heavily on the industry to establish its own safety standards.
And that’s happening, the report says, just as the Trump administration is pushing to expand oil and gas drilling to the Atlantic and off the Florida Gulf Coast, where it is currently banned.
After the Deepwater Horizon explosion on April 20, 2010, killed 11 men and set off the worst oil spill in U.S. history, President Barack Obama’s administration determined the government had ceded too much control to industry and created a new regulatory agency, the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) to impose new safety regulations.
But since Trump took office in 2017, he has inserted former Louisiana Lt. Gov. Scott Angelle, an unabashed supporter of the oil industry, as BSEE director and reversed major portions of the Obama-era regulations.
What’s more, Oceana’s report says BSEE inspectors are overwhelmed, with 120 inspectors to conduct more than 20,000 inspections of offshore drilling and production facilities.
But BSEE points out that the current number of inspectors -- actually 125, the agency says -- is about double its ranks in 2010. They have increased their output by 16 percent, conducting 9,800 inspections of offshore facilities in 2018, BSEE reported.
What's more, the agency says its inspection process has a greater impact now because it began measuring risk factors in 2018, rather than simply checking to see if equipment and training complied with industry standards.
"The Risk-Based Inspection protocol, launched in 2018, is one way that BSEE is driving safety performance and environmental stewardship improvements," BSEE said in a statement, noting that higher-risk oil and gas facilities get more attention under the new inspection protocol.
The Oceana report complains that penalties for oil spills provide little deterrent because a penalty cap of $44,675 per day means little to oil companies that spend $1 million a day to drill a single well.
But U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise, R-Metairie, the minority whip in the House of Representatives, says Oceana is pushing a biased and ultimately untenable agenda in hopes of blocking offshore oil and gas exploration. He told WWL-TV that some additional regulation was necessary after BP, but the Obama administration went too far.
"We're clearly a lot safer when you look at the new regulations for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico,” Scalise said. “Every other company that was drilling out there had already been safe, had great safety records before. You had one massive mistake that cost lives and cost incredible environmental damage. And you always want to learn from that. But you don't want to punish the people who were already doing everything right. You want to say, ‘Look, let's make sure this can't happen again,’ and there are now higher standards in place."
Read the full report here:
But an exclusive WWL-TV investigation in 2015 found major weaknesses in safety and environmental oversight, even under the new, supposedly tougher Obama-era regulatory structure. And an independent review by the Government Accountability Office in 2016, before Trump was elected, found the government made only “limited progress in enhancing (BSEE’s) investigative capabilities” and “continues to rely on pre-Deepwater Horizon … policies and procedures” when there’s a spill or accident offshore.
That’s why Diane Hoskins, campaign director for Oceana, questioned if the Obama-era safeguards were sufficient to really reduce the risks offshore.
"The president should stop any efforts to roll back the few safeguards that were put in place as a response to Deepwater Horizon. BSEE should invest more in oversight of the industry,” she told WWL-TV in a telephone interview.
Scalise spoke to WWL-TV after his annual tour of offshore oil and gas facilities with a group of his Republican congressional colleagues. He said the biggest safety improvement has been the adoption of “stop-work authority” across the entire industry.
“The ability for anyone on a rig to shut down an entire production if they see anything unsafe,” he said. “Those are the kind of things that show you that the standards are there. They're working, and things are much safer. I think we can all be more comfortable because of that."
In the past, his tour introduced drilling rigs, impressive “floating cities” in the middle of the Gulf, to members of Congress like Ryan Zinke, who later served as Trump’s Interior secretary.
This year Scalise was joined by Rep. Denver Riggleman of Virginia, who said their trip to a Hess drilling operation offshore helped ease his previous concerns about the risks of allowing drilling off the waters of his state.
“I saw individuals, not only with engineering expertise but environmental expertise, using lessons learned as they went through everything they did as far as safety based on everything that’s happened over the last decade,” Riggleman told WWL-TV. “And I think I’m in a fortunate position, because … we can take those lessons learned to Virginia, off the coast there.”
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David Hammer can be reached at dhammer@wwltv.com; Meghan Kee can be reached at mkee@wwltv.com;