Barack Obama reversed a planned expansion of offshore drilling today, admitting he had been wrong to believe that oil companies were prepared to deal with a catastrophic oil spill.
He told a White House press conference he was ordering a six-month freeze on the opening up of the remote waters of the Arctic to oil exploration and on the drilling of 33 deepwater wells in the Gulf of Mexico. Proposed lease sales off the coast of Virginia and in the western Gulf would also be cancelled.
The US president said he was calling the pause to plans by Royal Dutch Shell to begin drilling exploratory wells in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas, after studying an interior department review of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
He acknowledged that the enormity of the Gulf oil spill had forced a change in his earlier thinking that offshore drilling was safe and should remain a vital part of America’s energy mix. “Where I was wrong was in my belief that the oil companies had their act together when it came to worst-case scenarios,” he said. “It just takes one to have a wake-up call.”
The announcement represents a retreat from Obama’s proposal last March to expand offshore oil drilling. It was overshadowed in part by the president’s moves to assert his command over the oil spill and appease critics who say his government has yielded to BP too much authority over plans to plug the well and clean up the environmental damage.
The president, who said repeatedly he remained in command of the disaster, also defended that earlier decision. He acknowledged he had underestimated the scale of corruption and dysfunction in the government agency charged with oversight of the offshore oil industry, the Minerals Management Service. “There has been a scandalously close relationship between oil companies and the agency that regulates them,” Obama said.
His administration had started cleaning up the agency, notorious for sex and drug parties in the George Bush era. But “the culture had not fully changed at MMS. And I take responsibility for that,” he said.
“We have to make sure if we are going forward with domestic oil production that the federal agency overseeings its safety and security is operating at the highest level.”
The six-month halt in drilling falls short of the outright ban sought by Democratic members of Congress on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and by environmental organisations. Conservationists said they hoped the review of environmental and safety regulations also discussed by Obama would lead to better protection, especially for the Arctic.
“The greatest risk had been the exploratory wells that Shell wanted to move forward with up in the Arctic, so we are particularly pleased the administration is putting forward a time-out,” said Jeremy Symons, senior vice-president of the National Wildlife Federation. “It should give time to assess and learn the lessons from this in terms of drilling anywhere else.”
Obama said he was basing his decision on the safety review conducted by the interior secretary, Ken Salazar.
The administration also imposed tougher safety standards on drilling rigs, ordering more rigorous testing of blow-out preventers and procedures for well control; both were seen as critical failures in the lead-up to the explosion.
The administration announced the exit of Elizabeth Birnbaum, the head of MMS. But the high-profile sacking is unlikely to satisfy calls for sweeping reform of an agency that has had overly close ties with the oil industry.
“She has only been the public face of MMS for 10 months,” said Nick Rahall, who heads the house committee on natural resources which is investigating the oil disaster. “It must not be the end game of our efforts to get at the root cause of the problems in the MMS.”
Obama is facing calls from conservationists to sack other senior MMS officials, including Sylvia Baca, who was appointed to the agency last June after being employed for more than eight years by BP in senior management positions.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/may/27/obama-strategy-offshore-oil-drilling
