The Interior Department tightened its rules on offshore oil and gas operations on Thursday but left in place the moratorium on deepwater drilling that has left oil executives frustrated and Gulf Coast officials fuming.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar called the new rules a fundamental change in offshore operations that will guide all future leasing and development decisions in the gulf, the Arctic and elsewhere.
The new rules — governing well casing and cementing, blowout preventers, safety certification, emergency response and worker training — provide offshore drillers with clarity on the terms under which drilling will resume when the current freeze ends.
...Jacqueline Savitz, a senior scientist at Oceana, a nonprofit environmental group, said that the new regulations alone would not prevent another spill.
“The BP disaster occurred because standards were not met and monitoring and inspections were too lax,” she said. “While stricter standards might help, adding them ignores the fact that there is simply no guarantee they will be followed.”
She urged Mr. Salazar to continue the freeze on deepwater drilling and extend it to shallow-water wells.
via www.nytimes.com
Extend it to shallow-water wells? Too extreme.
The most frustrating part of government when something like this happens is when you hear that we had the rules and regulations in place that would have prevented it, but they were ignored by the rules and regulators.
[Insert public choice critique of government and slam on blogger's naivete here]
