Trump’s Risky Offshore Oil Strategy – New York Times

Photo BPs Deepwater Horizon drill rig exploding in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. Credit Gerald Herbert/Associated Press

Seven years ago, a BP oil well blew out off Louisiana, causing the Deepwater Horizon drill rig to explode, killing 11 workers and releasing several million barrels of toxic crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

As co-chairmen of the bipartisan National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, we investigated the causes of the disaster and examined the offshore drilling industry to identify ways to reduce the risks it poses to workers, the public and the environment. Although Congress has refused to enact any of the commissions safety recommendations, the Department of the Interior adopted many of them after extensive input from industry, government and the public.

President Trumps April 28 executive order on offshore energy threatens to abolish these safety improvements and, as he put it, start the process of opening offshore areas to energy exploration. He took a further step last week to expand oil and gas extraction in the environmentally sensitive outer continental shelf. The commission members are unanimous in their view that the actions proposed in the presidents executive order are unwise.

As Americans flock to the nations beaches this summer, it is important to understand what Mr. Trumps recent moves portend. Specifically, his executive order calls for the reconsideration of a critical safeguard that is the most important action the government has taken to reduce offshore drilling hazards. This safeguard, the well control rule, tightened controls on blowout preventers designed to stop explosions in undersea oil and gas wells. The rule was based in part on lessons the commission learned about the root cause of the BP disaster.

Had this common-sense rule been in place on April 20, 2010, that calamity might well have been averted. Weakening or rescinding this rule would increase the risks of offshore operations, put workers in harms way and imperil marine waters and coastlines.

Mr. Trumps order also directed the Interior Department to review current rules on offshore drilling. Opening more areas to exploration, as the Trump administration moved to do last week, could threaten the fragile Arctic Ocean off Alaska as well as environmentally sensitive reaches of the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. A spill in any of those waters could threaten multibillion-dollar regional economies that depend on clean oceans and coastlines.

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Trump's Risky Offshore Oil Strategy - New York Times