Louisiana Offshore Safety: Post BP Rules “Relaxed” By Department of Interio

Louisiana offshore injuries are caused by a variety of factors: fatigue, routine failure to apply basic common sense, and production pressures are chief among them. After the Deep Water Horizon incident of April 2010, government officials bulked up safety regulations to ensure that such accidents would not, and could not, occur in the future. These rules acted  as a “back stop” on what oil companies could and could not do during offshore drilling operations, and served to protect offshore workers from being severely killed or injured in blow-outs or other drilling accidents.

The new Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement rules serve to loosen, or, in some instances, obliterate, basic safety measures related to blow-out preventers and other safety mechanisms.

BSEE said the changes would help meet Trump’s goal of “energy dominance” by ramping up domestic oil and gas output. “Reducing unnecessary burdens” of regulation should save the energy industry $228 million over a decade, the agency estimates.

Additionally, BSEE said it’s working on a more consequential rewrite to a rule that was enacted to minimize the risk of a well explosion like the Deepwater Horizon one that killed 11 workers.

BSEE wants to relax requirements to have backup plans for blowout preventers, valves used to prevent oil spills. It would also erase a requirement that BSEE confirm the number of pressure drillers used in new wells is “safe.”