President Donald Trump's administration today rolled back some of the offshore drilling safety regulations put in place after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster that killed 11 and spilled an estimated 3.2mn bl of crude.
The final revisions to the "well control rule," which administration officials announced today in Louisiana, are expected to save industry $152mn/yr over the next decade. The bulk of the savings would come from allowing less frequent testing of blowout preventers, which house powerful shears that can pinch a pipeline closed in an emergency. The rule would also revise design requirements for those devices.
US interior secretary David Bernhardt said the rule would put "safety first" and eliminate unnecessary regulatory burdens. The final rule revises only 20pc of the provisions in the initial well control rule, which was issued in 2016 under former president Barack Obama in the wake of one of the worst US oil spill disasters.
Offshore industry officials lauded the changes as common-sense updates that would improve safety. National Ocean Industries Association president Randall Luthi said the "narrowly focused revisions" would leave most of the original rule intact but address technical problems that detracted from the goal of safe operations.
But environmentalists and some state officials say the administration is disregarding key lessons from the Deepwater Horizon accident, such as the need for redundant safety systems and frequent testing of critical components. They said the changes released today were "reckless" and put the profits of the oil industry above public safety.
"Another catastrophic offshore oil spill just became far more likely," Center for Biological Diversity ocean legal director Kristen Monsell said.
The safety rule revisions come as the administration works on a separate proposal to open nearly all federal waters to drilling. Interior recently put that plan on hold, but coastal state governors are still likely to lead opposition to the revisions.
The US Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE), through the rule today, will allow offshore operators to reduce pressure and function testing of blowout preventer components to every 21 days instead of every 14 days. BSEE will also remove a requirement to have a separate "centering mechanism" on the blowout preventer to optimize its ability to shear off drill pipe during a blowout.
But BSEE pulled back from an earlier plan that would have allowed accumulators, which store energy to activate shear rams, to be installed thousands of feet away at the surface rather than directly on the blowout preventer. BSEE also decided to keep a requirement for blowout preventers to have dual "blind shear rams" that are each independently capable of shearing a pipe.
The offshore industry failed to secure a push to relax a requirement for operators to use a "drilling margin," which refers to the weight of drilling fluids, of 0.5 pounds/USG. BSEE said it was keeping that standard but would allow operators to seek earlier regulatory approval for variances from that specific requirement.
