Phil Taylor, E&E reporter
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar today said his department is developing new rules to improve the performance of sub-sea blowout preventers to avoid a repeat of last year’s BP PLC Macondo well blowout and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Salazar said the updated rules are in response to an Interior-commissioned forensic report issued last month that found the blowout preventer’s blind shear rams — the equipment’s final line of defense against an oil gusher — could not seal off BP’s well as designed because the drill pipe had buckled in the initial blast (E&ENews PM, March 23).
“We’ll also be looking to develop some additional improvements with respect to BOPs,” Salazar told reporters during a conference call this morning. “Those will be mostly in the area of instrumentation and actuation and effectiveness with respect to dual blind shear rams.”
Salazar spoke from Mexico, where he is meeting with government and industry officials on creating a “gold standard” for deepwater drilling safety and discussing a Gulf of Mexico transboundary agreement.
Interior Deputy Secretary David Hayes said the agency will be looking to the new Ocean Energy Safety Advisory Committee for advice on the new rules and that it hopes to issue an advance notice for proposed rulemaking in the coming months. The notice will solicit comment from a variety of sources on what upgrades are appropriate for blowout preventers and other deepwater drilling technologies, Hayes said.
“We obviously are requiring a whole new set of tests relative to the functionality of blowout preventers,” said Salazar, who touted new drilling safety measures already implemented that include well integrity standards and worst-case discharge calculations, among others. “We are looking at what else is needed, and that is part of a regulatory rulemaking process which is being undertaken.”
The new rules come as Interior and the Coast Guard conduct joint hearings in New Orleans this week to discuss what went wrong with BP’s blowout preventer, a device most had considered “fail-safe” before the Deepwater Horizon incident.
Michael Bromwich, director of Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, last week told a House committee that blowout preventers could no longer be considered fail-safe devices and that more information would be provided in this week’s hearings on the Det Norske Veritas forensic report.
Special thanks to Richard Charter