While concluding that last spring's Gulf oil disaster was "not Obama's Katrina," a commission led by former Florida Gov. Bob Graham nevertheless heaped blame on federal regulators, BP Petroleum and the oil industry in general.
The spill "was both foreseeable and preventable," Graham said Tuesday as he opened a news conference in Washington, D.C. He cited "systemic failures" within the industry and the federal agency that oversees oil and gas production, saying "our regulators were consistently outmatched."
Graham, a former Democratic senator, also said conflicts of interest at the U.S. Minerals Management Service impaired the agency's regulatory rigor. The agency's sales and regulatory efforts have since been divided in an effort to avoid such conflicts in the future.
But commission co-chair William Reilly, a director of the Environmental Protection Agency under President George H.W. Bush, offered that the explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, which dumped millions of gallons into the Gulf of Mexico, "was not Obama's Katrina."
Still, Florida state Sen. Don Gaetz, R-Niceville, called the panel's assessment "a stinging indictment of the administration's handling of the oil spill."
Gaetz, a leading lawmaker in the state's own response and recovery efforts, noted that "Bob Graham is a Democrat, but he's Floridian first. It says a lot when one of the nation's leading Democrats makes such comments."
The 398-page report by the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling dissected the events before, during and after the April 20 explosion. The presidentially appointed panel concluded:
- The explosive loss of the Macondo well, tapped by the Deepwater Horizon platform, could have been prevented.
- The immediate causes of the Macondo well blowout can be traced to a series of identifiable mistakes made by BP, Halliburton and Transocean that reveal such systematic failures in risk management that they place in doubt the safety culture of the entire industry.
- Deepwater energy exploration and production, particularly at the frontiers of experience, involve risks for which neither industry nor government has been adequately prepared, but for which they can and must be prepared in the future.
- To assure human safety and environmental protection, regulatory oversight of leasing, energy exploration and production require reforms even beyond those significant reforms already initiated since the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
- Because regulatory oversight alone will not be sufficient to ensure adequate safety, the oil and gas industry will need to take its own, unilateral steps to increase dramatically safety throughout the industry, including self-policing mechanisms that supplement governmental enforcement.
- The technology, laws and regulations and practices for containing, responding to and cleaning up spills lag behind the real risks associated with deepwater drilling into large, high-pressure reservoirs of oil and gas located far offshore and thousands of feet below the oceans surface. Government must close the existing gap and industry must support rather than resist that effort.
Graham & Co. went on to ask a basic logistical question: "Why was a corporation drilling for oil in mile-deep water 49 miles off the Louisiana coast?"
The panel answered: "Americans today consume vast amounts of petroleum products -- some 18.7 million barrels per day -- to fuel our economy."
In his remarks Tuesday, Graham elaborated on that theme, saying the answer to oil dependence is to conserve energy and look to alternatives.
At the current level of proven reserves and our current consumption of petroleum, if America were to go to a `drill, baby, drill philosophy, we would exhaust our reserves by approximately 2031, he said.
The spill, Graham said, shows the absolute imperative of moving aggressively toward reducing Americas almost insatiable appetite for petroleum.
As long as Americans thirst for oil, offshore drilling operations will become increasingly expensive, evermore technologically challenging and potentially dangerous, the report stated.
In conclusion, the commission said, "We recognize that the improvements we advocate all come with costs and all will take time to implement. But inaction, as we are deeply aware, runs the risk of real costs, too: in more lost lives, in broad damage to the regional economy and its long-term viability, and in further tens of billions of dollars of avoidable cleanup costs.
"Indeed, if the clear challenges are not addressed and another disaster happens, the entire offshore energy enterprise is threatened -- and with it, the nations economy and security."
Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio issued a statement on Tuesday saying, So long as it can be done safely, I support offshore energy exploration as a way to meet our energy needs, create jobs and reduce our dependency on foreign oil from unstable countries.
--
Contact Kenric Ward at kward@sunshinestatenews.com or at (772) 801-5341.
