One of the most glaring problems exposed by BP's Gul oil spill is the utter failure of the environmental regulatory process, and the even larger failure of a comprehensive regulatory process integrating environmental regulations with safety regulations. BP's atrocious record with the Texas City refinery, which suffered a disastrous explosion in 2005, killing 15 people and injury 170 others, was a vivid example of this failure, the result of multiple failures over a period of at least 15 years (starting before BP purchased the refinery), which persisted even after the explosion, resulting in an additional three deaths at the plant since the explosion. As just one indication of the systemic problems involved, in October, 2009 OSHA imposed an $87 million fine for BP's repeated failures to fix problems related to the explosion--far and away the largest such fine ever assessed. OSHA cited 709 violations in imposing the fine. From the NYT account:
Officials at OSHA, which is part of the Labor Department, said the 709 violations included a failure to perform a promised study of pressure relief devices, which help prevent a buildup of undue pressure of hydrocarbons, and a failure to meet industry standards for safety instrument systems to shut down hazardous processes automatically.
Labor Secretary Hilda L. Solis said on Friday that BP had allowed hundreds of potential hazards to continue even though it had signed a settlement in 2005 agreeing to take broad action to protect employees.
"Fifteen people lost their lives as a result of the 2005 tragedy, and 170 others were injured," Ms. Solis said. "An $87 million fine won't restore those lives, but we can't let this happen again. Workplace safety is more than a slogan. It's the law."
However, $87 million is less than two days profit for BP, barely a blip. While the total cost of the explosion to BP was considerably higher, and the previous CEO was even forced to resign, the fact that such a massive fine was assessed four years after the explosion pretty much speaks for itself. But BP's failures are just part of the overall system that includes systemic regulatory failures as well-not to mention the failures of our money-drenched political system.
While the explosion of BP/Transocean's Deepwater Horizon drilling rig was a horrific event, it was neither surprising nor unexpected.
BP is one of the most powerful corporations operating in the United States. Its 2009 revenues of $239bn are enough to rank BP as the third-largest corporation in the country. It spends aggressively to influence US policy and regulatory oversight.
In 2009, the company spent nearly $16m on lobbying the federal government, ranking it among the 20 highest spenders that year, and shattering its own previous record of $10.4m set in 2008. In 2008, it also spent more than $530,000 on federal elections, placing it among the oil industry's top 10 political spenders.
This money has bought BP great access and, many would argue, leniency. "I personally believe that BP, with its corporate culture of greed over profits, murdered my parents," Eva Rowe testified before Congress in 2007....
Rowe's parents were both killed in the Texas City refinery explosion, which Congress was investigating. Juhasz goes on to say:
When the next great explosion at a US oil workplace occurred, it was of little surprise to learn that it was, again, BP at fault. It also came as little surprise that the location was the deep offshore waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
BP and the entire oil industry have lobbied aggressively to open new US waters to offshore drilling and expand the access they already had. For decades, the vast majority of drilling from the US Gulf took place on simple scaffolds in 30ft to 200ft of water. In the past 10 years, the number of rigs drilling in depths of greater than 1,000ft (deep wells) has risen dramatically, as have ultra-deep wells, those greater than 5,000ft. The trend is problematic for many reasons, including that drilling of water depths greater than 500ft releases methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide in the contribution to global warming.
Many of the shallower fields have dried up, and the industry has become ever more flush with cash (in 2009, for the first time in history, seven of the 10 largest corporations in the world were oil companies) and more desperate for oil. As a result, the companies - led by BP, the largest producer of oil in the US Gulf - are breaking all records, pushing ever deeper - and well past the point of technological know-how and safety.
Essentially, what has happened is that the industry has pushed into a whole new technological frontier, even while exhibiting an abysmal safety record with the century-old techonology of refineries. That in itself would be problematic enough if it were being scrupulously regulated, but the exact opposite is the case, as Kieran Suckling of the Center for Biological Diversity explained this week in appearances on both Countdown and Democracy Now!. Suckling revealed that BP's well was subject only to the most lenient level of processes, designed for "minimally intrusive actions like building outhouses and hiking trails."
On Countdown, he said:
Well, if the Department of Interior had done a full environmental impact statement, as it's required to do by law, the first thing it would have done was thrown out BP's drilling plan and sent it back to the drawing board. The plan is surreal, it is so lacking in details regarding safety and impacts on the environment. Secondly, the Department of Interior would have had to have developed an environmentally preferred alternative. And lastly, it quite likely would have ended this whole process by choosing the no-action alternative, which is required in every EIS, meaning, it would have just said we're not going to allow BP to drill. It's not safe enough. The agency hasn't developed a rational plan.
And on Democracy Now! he said:
Well, when a federal government is going to approve a project, it has to go through an environmental review. But for projects that have very, very little impact like building an outhouse or a hiking trail, they can use something called a categorical exclusion and say there's no impact here at all so we don't need to spend energy or time doing a review. Well, we looked at the oil drilling permits being issued by the Minerals Management Service in the Gulf, and we were shocked to find out that they were approving hundreds of massive oil drilling permits using this categorical exclusion instead of doing a full environmental impact study. And then, we found out that BP's drilling permit-the very one that exploded-was done under this loophole and so it was never reviewed by the federal government at all. It was just rubber-stamped.
I'm not that familiar with the federal environmental law governing environmental reviews, known as NEPA (the National Environmental Policy Act), but I am familiar with California's equivalent, CEQA (the California Environmental Quality Act), and I know that the two are intentionally quite similar. I've covered a number of projects that had to be approved under both at the level of a full review. I was less certain, however, about the lower levels of review, and so I contacted Suckling to see how closely the federal standards and California's standards coincided.
The parallels turned out to be quite close. Both laws have one level for significant projects that will have a significant environmental impact requiring that various measures be taken to mitigate the environmental impact--and that might possibly not be approved at all if the dangers are too high. (This is the only level at which I have had any federal experience, since local port projects that involve navigable waters fall under federal as well as state jurisdictions.) Both have a secondary level for projects that will have more modest impacts, projects "that might have harm", as Suckling put it. Under CEQA, this process is known as a 'Mitigated Negative Declaration' [MND], the meaning of which is that, 'if we do it right, it won't have any significant impact.' And both laws have a third category, where a project is simply declared to be too minor to require any analysis. That's what Suckling was describing. On the federal level, it would be for "building an outhouse or a hiking trail" as he described. On the state level, it would be for a similar level of activity, such as road repair-but not something like building a major street. The Port of Los Angeles recently completed construction of a 20-acre park, as part of a package of landscape improvements that was subject to a MND. So, BP's deep-water drilling--and many more just like it--was treated as if it were environmentally trivial, far less significant in impact than the creation of a large city park.
Now, one more thing is worth noting here. Projects are evaluated for the impacts they will have both during operation and during construction. The potential impacts involved are commonly quite different. Hauling a lot of topsoil for a park is going to generate pollution, including greenhouse gases. The park itself, just sitting there for forty years? Not so much. By the same logic, I said to Suckling, even if the wells could be considered so free from risk, how could anyone pretend that drilling a deepwater oil well could be so risk-free as not to require any review?
That's when he told me the real shocker: Decommissioning the wells, taking them down once they've stopped producing, requires an environmental review: "If you drill a well, that's exempt, if you remove a well that's not exempt."
Could it possibly be any more absurd?
More absurd-no. But it does get worse. It gets worse because of the bigger picture--the bigger picture being Ken Salazar, and how he's failed to reform the department he inherited from the Bush/Cheney oil regime. Here's what Suckling said about that on Countdown:
SUCKLING: Partially, yeah. I do think that Obama's first mistake was in picking Ken Salazar for secretary of Interior. I mean, Salazar has a deep, deep connection to the offshore oil drilling industry. And since coming in as secretary of Interior, he has done everything possible to push for more expansive offshore drilling. So yeah, he has culpability there. But I'll tell you what, the president is certainly not responsible for reviewing drilling plans in the Gulf. He is not responsible for determining whether the laws are followed down there. That is Ken Salazar's job, as secretary of Interior.
In fact, when Ken Salazar came into office, it was right after the drugs and sex with oil execs scandal. He said his first pledge, this is a corrupt agency, the Mineral Management Service, I'm going to reform it. He pledged that on day one and didn't do it. In fact, he made things much worst in terms of environmental compliance. I think the buck very much stops with Ken Salazar.
OLBERMANN: In your eyes, who owns this more? We sing that song oh, this is Obama's Katrina or this is Cheney's Katrina. Is one or the other closer to being the truth and ultimately does it matter?
SUCKLING: Well, I do think it matters, because the answer to that question leads you to what is the solution. Obviously, they both do. I mean, I think Cheney's left a legacy of corrupt officials throughout this agency has made the agency incapable of acting properly, incapable of being independent. So that's there. But you know what? Cheney's not going to change. He's old news. Obama can. And I think if we recognize that Obama erred in putting Salazar in charge of this critical agency, a man with deep, deep ties to the oil industry. And secondly he erred in listening to Salazar and opening up the Atlantic Coast, the eastern Gulf Coast of Mexico, and the Arctic in Alaska to new offshore oil drilling. That was a mistake. The good news is the president can reverse course. We're early in that process. He can do that. He can reform the Mineral Management Service. And frankly, he can ask Ken Salazar to step down in the wake of this crisis. So there's a lot of opportunities for the president to fix what's going on out there.
Of course, you look all across the Obama Administration, and all you see are Ken Salazars, so it's pretty damn obvious by now that this is how Obama intends to govern. But it's equally obvious that this simply isn't working. If this enormous oil spill isn't enough to send that message, nothing will. And it's quite possible that nothing will. Obama, it turns out, is a deeply ideological man. But if ever there were a time for truth, a moment of reckoning that could lead to a change of direction, now would be a perfect time. And just to re-emphasize this, Suckling & the CBD sent out an email on Friday about the continuing practice of rubbing-stamping deep well drilling:
MMS Approved 27 Gulf Drilling Operations After BP Disaster
26 Were Exempted From Environmental Review, Including Two to BP
Salazar's "Moratorium" on New Drilling Permits Allows Continuation of the Same Flawed Environmental Exemption Process that Allowed the BP Catastrophe
TUCSON, Ariz.- Even as the BP drilling explosion which killed eleven people continues to gush hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil per day into the Gulf of Mexico, the U.S. Department of Interior's Minerals Management Service (MMS) has continued to exempt dangerous new drilling operations from environmental review. Twenty-seven new offshore drilling projects have been approved since April 20, 2010; twenty-six under the same environmental review exemption used to approve the disastrous BP drilling that is fouling the Gulf and its wildlife.
"The MMS has learned absolutely nothing from this national catastrophe," said Kierán Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, "It is still illegally exempting dangerous offshore drilling projects in the Gulf of Mexico from all environmental review. It is outrageous and unacceptable."
....
Two of the newly approved-and environmentally exempted-drilling operations were awarded to BP despite the fact that the new plans are based on the exact same false assertions about oil rig safety and the improbability of environmental damage even of oil spill occurs:
BP drilling plan approved April 6, 2010 [sic-should be 2009] (this is the one that exploded):
"2.7 Blowout Scenario - A scenario for a potential blowout of the well from which BP would expect to have the highest volume of liquid hydrocarbons is not required for the operations proposed in this EP."
BP drilling plan approved May 5, 2010:
"II.J. Blowout Scenario - Information not required for activities proposed in this Initial Exploration Plan."
(see table below for further comparison).
....
BP Exploration Plan, Mississippi Canyon Area, Approved April 6, 2009
(this is the one that exploded)
BP Exploration Plan, Green Canyon Area, Approved May 6, 2010
"2.7 Blowout Scenario - A scenario for a potential blowout of the well from which BP would expect to have the highest volume of liquid hydrocarbons is not required for the operations proposed in this EP."
"II.J. Blowout Scenario - Information not required for activities proposed in this Initial Exploration Plan."
"14.5 Alternatives - No alternatives to the proposed activities were considered to reduce environmental impacts."
"VI. Alternatives - No alternatives to the proposed activities were considered to reduce environmental impacts."
"14.6 Mitigation Measures - No mitigation measures other than those required by regulation and BP policy will be employed to avoid, diminish or eliminate potential impacts on environmental resources."
"VII. Mitigation Measures - No mitigation measures other than those required by regulation will be employed to avoid, diminish ,or eliminate potential impacts on environmental resources."
"14.7 Consultation - No agencies or persons were consulted regarding potential impacts associated with the proposed activities."
"VIII. Consultation - No agencies or persons were consulted regarding potential impacts associated with the proposes activities. Therefore, a list of such entities has not been provided."
"14.3 Impacts on Proposed Activities - The site-specific environmental conditions have been taken into account for the proposed activities and no impacts are expected as a result of these conditions."
"IV. Impacts on Proposed Activities - The proposed well locations were evaluated for any seafloor and subsurface geological and manmade features and conditions that may adversely affect operations. No impacts are expected from site-specific environmental conditions."
"14.2.3.2 Wetlands - An accidental oil spill from the proposed activities could cause impacts to wetlands. However, due to the distance to shore (48 miles) and the response capabilities that would be implemented, no significant adverse impacts are expected." (p. 45)
"III.C.2. Wetlands...Due to the distance from shore and the available oil spill response capabilities, no adverse impacts to wetlands are anticipated as a result of the proposed activities. Activities proposed in the EP will be covered by BP's Oil Spill Response Plan (OSRP)."
"14.2.2.1 Essential Fish Habitat - ...In the event of an unanticipated blowout resulting in an oil spill, it is unlikely to have an impact based on the industry wide standards for using proven equipment and technology for such responses, implementation of BP's Regional Oil Spill Response Plan which address available equipment and removal of the oil spill."
"III.B.11. Essential Fish Habitat...Should a spill occur in the area of a mobile adult finfish or shellfish, the effects would likely be sublethal and the extent of the damage would be reduced to the capability of adult fish and shellfish to avoid a spill, to metabolize hydrocarbons, and to excrete both metabolites and parent compounds. Activities proposed in the EP will be covered by BP's Oil Spill Response Plan (OSRP)."
Clearly, despite political theater to the contrary, at the everyday level, it's still business as usual at the Department of the Interior. This is exactly what you'd expect from the Bush/Cheney regime in such a situation.
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