White House Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar issued a new moratorium July 12 on deepwater oil drilling.A federal judge in New Orleans had issued an injunction against the original moratorium June 22, blocking the moratorium’s enforcement and allowing drilling to continue for deepwater oil rigs with sub-sea wells at 500-foot depths.The new moratorium contains supplementary information that the first had lacked to aid Salazar’s case and justify what District Court Judge Martin Felman had initially dismissed as “a blanket moratorium with no parameters.”In the Secretary of the Interior’s decision memorandum, Salazar acknowledged the unlikelihood of another blowout immediately following Deepwater Horizon but forbade drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf until Nov. 30.
Salazar expressed distrust of offshore rig safety regulations prior to the BP oil spill, noting Deepwater Horizon had passed all inspections prior to its explosion, and emphasized the exact causes of the Deepwater Horizon spill remain unknown.”The lack of knowledge about the root cause in and of itself poses a present and unacceptable risk to the extent that we have no guarantee that operators would not be engaging in the very same activity that led to the BP oil spill,” Salazar wrote in the statement.The American Petroleum Institute, a powerful special interest group for the oil industry, criticized the moratorium in a statement by CEO and president Jack Gerard.
“It places the jobs of tens of thousands of workers in serious and immediate jeopardy and promises a substantial reduction in domestic energy production,” the statement read.Gerard argued the government has imposed strict safety regulations in the wake of the BP oil spill, and deepwater drilling operations could resume under federal purview without hazard.
Salazar’s 22-page document explained the inadequacies of the oil industry’s current subsea Blowout Preventers. “In a nutshell, the ability to contain a deepwater spill effectively and quickly when a subsea BOP stack fails does not exist,” Salazar wrote.The memorandum states that subsea BOPs are less accessible to response crews than those at surface level, and the remote control system for deepwater BOPs is more elaborate than its surface level counterpart.Low temperatures and high pressures in the deep sea also pose a problem for spill control. Engineers failed to anticipate methane hydrate crystals forming on the 98-ton steel and concrete containment dome they attempted to lower onto the leaking well, and the containment dome strategy was aborted.Salazar invoked congressional testimony of oil industry executives, who admitted that “many of the containment methods attempted had been improvised and were untested.”Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) has suggested that the moratorium on deepwater floating oil rigs will have a more devastating effect on Louisiana commerce than the oil spill. Gov. Bobby Jindal has warned that the moratorium will discourage drilling companies from operating their rigs in Louisiana waters, citing two rigs that have already been relocated to foreign countries.The debate on the drilling moratorium is stalemated between Louisiana’s environmental sanctity and its commercial solvency. The prudence of our public officials requires them to take the necessary steps to prevent another oil spill just as the Gulf Coast struggles to recuperate from the BP oil spill.
The inevitable downsizing of the state’s petroleum industry, on the other hand, would devastate thousands of oil industry workers and cripple Louisiana’s economy.
The choice is between the unlikelihood of an envrionmentally-catastrophic sequel to Deepwater Horizon and the certainty of grave injury to “oil and gas production quite simply elemental to gulf communities,” as Judge Felman wrote.The outcome for Louisiana could be a dual tragedy — first of environment, and then of industry.–Contact Trevor Fanning at [email protected]