Even as They Receive New Drilling Permits, Oil Industry Still Can’t Demonstrate Ability to Stop and Respond to Spills, Says Markey
 
WASHINGTON (March 28, 2011) – Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), the top Democrat on the Natural Resources Committee, today asked the Department of Interior to explain how it intends to address the recent finding that design faults in blowout preventers could cause widespread failure by the devices should a blowout occur. Rep. Markey also asked about the spill response plans for the six deepwater permits granted by the drilling agency, after the plan for the first drilling permit was reported by press to have been dated in 2009, prior to the BP Deepwater Horizon accident.
 
“These two examples of ineffectual oil industry responses to the BP spill calls into question the wisdom of moving forward with new deepwater oil drilling permits without better evidence that safety concerns are being properly addressed,” says Rep. Markey. “If a blowout preventer can’t stop a spill, and the oil industry still is still relying on pre-Deepwater Horizon spill response plans, I have to ask how much has changed since the worst oil spill in U.S. history occurred nearly one year ago.”
 
A report released last week by the firm Det Norske Veritas, contracted by the Interior Department to study the blowout preventer from the BP spill, said that the blowout preventer failed to stop the flow of oil from the Macondo well last April, even though it worked as designed. The report called for a review of design elements in the blowout preventers that might lead to similar events.
 
Rather than finding that the blowout preventer had failed to operate due to human or mechanical error, the report concluded that the force of the fluids gushing out of the blown out well caused the drill pipe to buckle, preventing the rams from cutting the pipe and preventing the rubber gaskets from sealing off the flow of oil.
 
“The results of this study appear to indicate that rather than being a ‘fail-safe’ device, blowout preventers may instead be ‘sure to fail’ during actual blowouts,” writes Rep. Markey in the letter to Michael Bromwich, the head of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement. “This is a highly disturbing conclusion, particularly in light of the Department’s recent approval of six deepwater drilling permits.”
 
The full letter to Bromwich can be found HERE .
 
In the letter, Rep. Markey asks whether the Interior Department will be conducting a review of all blowout preventers deployed in U.S. waters, and whether they will also “halt all permitting activities until such examination and modification activities are complete.” If not, Markey requested information about how the Interior Department is going to ensure proper safety precautions are followed.
 
Rep. Markey also asks for the spill response plans for the drilling permits issued over the last two months following the report on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show revealing the fact that the spill response plan offered by Noble Energy and accepted by the Interior Department was produced in 2009. That was before the BP spill and before an investigation by Rep. Markey and his colleagues on the Energy and Commerce Committee found that the oil industry spill response plans were carbon copies of one another and included plans to evacuate walruses from the Gulf of Mexico.
 
“Approving this permit, especially with an outdated spill response plan, would seem in hindsight to be especially unwise given the DNV conclusion that blowout preventers cannot prevent actual blowouts,” writes Rep. Markey in the letter.
 
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