Last week, ExxonMobil filed a lawsuit against the Department of the Interior in the Western District of Louisiana. The lawsuit alleges that DOI, through the Minerals Management Service (MMS), acted improperly in cancelling three leases owned by ExxonMobil and Statoil, its 50% partner. The leases are in a field designated “Julia”, which lies in 7,000 feet of water, some 200 miles off the Louisiana coast. | Read More »
Colleague and occasional RS diarist Steve Maley testified before the House Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources on Thursday. The topic of the hearing was “The Deepwater Horizon Incident: Are the Minerals Management Service Regulations Doing the Job?” Full video of the hearing (over four hours) is available here. It featured testimony from the acting head of the MMS and the Interior Department’s Inspector General | Read More »
First, there was this: Obama, in an interview with NBC’s “Today” show, broadcast Tuesday, said he hadn’t spoken directly to BP CEO Tony Hayward because his experience tells him someone like that would say “all the right things” and that he’s more interested in action than in words. [Source.] Now, we have this: I think it’s fair to say, if six months ago, before this | Read More »
President Obama and Interior Secretary Salazar have done their best to shift the blame of the Deepwater Horizon disaster to the Bush Administration and the supposed ‘cozy relationship’ it fostered between the Minerals Management Service and the oil and gas companies it regulates. The public consciousness perceives a corrupt and incompetent agency, turning a blind eye to the shenanigans of their industry buddies. In reality: | Read More »
Amidst the puffing, pontificating and finger-pointing in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, two large questions loom: Who will the Feds hold accountable? How can our government assure us that a big oil spill will never happen again? Quick answers, with a caveat (I’m an engineer, not a lawyer): BP, as operator. They can’t, and we should not expect them to.
President Obama, quick to criticize George W. Bush for his appointment of a lightly-qualified Michael Brown as FEMA director, apparently learned little from his predecessor’s mistake. In today’s press conference, President Obama claimed to know nothing of MMS Director Liz Birnbaum’s sudden departure. Whatever. Let’s consider Liz’s qualifications to be the head of the agency charged with regulating rigs like the Deepwater Horizon and 30% | Read More »
This is certainly good news. There are signs that the “top kill” operations may be effective, Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen told NPR. He is in Houma, Louisiana, meeting with local officials and residents. “Since yesterday afternoon, British Petroleum and their subcontractors have been pumping a heavy mud down into the well bore below the blowout preventer, and over the course of the last 12 | Read More »
With great fanfare, President Obama dispatched Interior Department “S.W.A.T Teams” to all 29 active deepwater drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. Their charge: Perform a thorough, complete drilling inspection of each deepwater rig. Key on the BOP [blowout preventer] test time frame, leaks and resolution, discrepancies, and repairs. Make sure well control drills were performed as required by 30 CFR 250.462. What’s that? You | Read More »
It’s a lie, a gross distortion or a paranoid delusion. Take your pick. In a Daily Beast article, blogger Matthew Yglesias does his best to shoehorn a few bits of truth into the Obama gang’s favorite narrative: “It’s Bush’s fault!” In making his argument that the blowout and spill resulted from lax enforcement by the Minerals Management Service, Yglesias focuses on a program known as | Read More »
It’s a truism in the oil business: When it comes to solving a problem, one’s intelligence is proportional to the square of their physical distance from the problem. For those who barely squeaked through Intermediate Algebra, that means that Congress and Washington-based regulators are really, really smart when it comes to diagnosing and solving problems in the field. </snark> Before the blazing hulk of the | Read More »
The Minerals Management Service (MMS), the Department of the Interior agency charged with regulating offshore oil and gas production, notified operators this week that it has been using European Space Agency (ESA) satellite images to spot night time flares in the Gulf of Mexico for the last three years. Flaring of natural gas in small quantities is sometimes necessary for testing new wells (subject to | Read More »
… may I brag just a little? MMS Announces SAFE Award Finalists WASHINGTON, D.C.– The Department of the Interior’s Minerals Management Service today announced the national finalists for the Safety Awards for Excellence (SAFE) competition sponsored by the Minerals Management Service. Presented annually to Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) oil and gas operators and contractors who achieve excellence in safety and pollution prevention, the National SAFE | Read More »
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s road show made its New Orleans stop yesterday. The Secretary extended the public comment period on the Minerals Management Service’s Five Year Leasing Plan for the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), a Plan that would potentially open areas outside the Central and Western Gulf of Mexico and Alaska to oil and gas exploration for the first time since 1981. A copy of | Read More »
T. Boone Pickens’ wind energy plan calls for blanketing the Great Plains, from the Texas Panhandle to the Dakotas. That’s because that’s where the wind resource is best, right? Wrong! That’s because “nobody lives there”, at least from the perspective of the good folks on the coasts and in the big cities. Putting all those wind turbines in the Plains creates at least two knotty | Read More »
From Energy Current: A report released by the Department of the Interior Office of the Inspector General has revealed ethical violations by employees of the Royalty In Kind (RIK) program. The report alleges “unbridled unethical conduct” by employees, including illicit sexual relations with both RIK employees and members of the oil and gas industry, illegal drug use, and acceptance of numerous gifts and gratuities from | Read More »
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