Members of a federal advisory group are criticizing the Obama administration’s moratorium on deepwater oil and gas drilling, saying it will actually increase the risk of well blowouts and oil spills, rather than promote safety.
In May, after consulting 15 engineers and industry experts, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar issued a report recommending a six-month moratorium on all ongoing drilling projects in waters deeper than 500 feet. The drilling suspension took effect a few days later, but half of the advisory group said Salazar contradicted their position on the moratorium.
“When you shut down the rigs, you lose experienced staff,” said petroleum engineer Ken Arnold, one of the advisors protesting the moratorium. “They’ll go overseas or leave the industry. It’s hard to get them back.”
The consultants said the temporary drilling ban will force the newest and most reliable drilling rigs to leave the Gulf. In a letter, they also expressed concern that the prohibition unnecessarily harms the American economy, energy supplies and tens of thousands of offshore industry workers, without any significant safety gains.
The consultants criticizing the ban called it a “blanket moratorium” and argued that it goes beyond addressing the specific causes of the rig explosion, while punishing an industry that they say has otherwise had a clean safety record. The Interior Department, however, called the moratorium a necessary pause button to review safety protocols in deepwater operations.
Recent news stories have also attempted to elucidate the complex series of events that led up to the Deepwater Horizon explosion. The New York Times Monday reported on how a key safety component called the ”blind shear ram” was intended to “slice through the drill pipe, seal the well and save the day” in the case of an explosion:
But [blind shear rams] also can be rendered powerless by the failure of a single part, a point underscored in a confidential report that scrutinized the reliability of the Deepwater Horizon’s blowout preventer. The report, from 2000, concluded that the greatest vulnerability by far on the entire blowout preventer was one of the small shuttle valves leading to the blind shear ram. If this valve jammed or leaked, the report warned, the ram’s blades would not budge.
This sort of “single-point failure” figures prominently in an emerging theory of what went wrong with the Deepwater Horizon’s blind shear ram, according to interviews and documents. Some evidence suggests that when the crew activated the blind shear ram, its blades tried to cut the drill pipe, but then failed to finish the job because one or more of its shuttle valves leaked hydraulic fluid.
The investigation also pointed to larger regulatory deficiencies:
An examination by The New York Times highlights the chasm between the oil industry’s assertions about the reliability of its blowout preventers and a more complex reality. It reveals that the federal agency charged with regulating offshore drilling, the Minerals Management Service, repeatedly declined to act on advice from its own experts on how it could minimize the risk of a blind shear ram failure.
It also shows that the Obama administration failed to grapple with either the well-known weaknesses of blowout preventers or the sufficiency of the nation’s drilling regulations even as it made plans this spring to expand offshore oil exploration.
Thus far, congressional investigations have uncovered many other faults in the blowout preventer, including improper cementing and design problems.
Here goes more jobs with the shut down of oil well drilling. Obama is screwing things up
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Oil Drilling Moratorium Leads to Apprehension | FairWarning…
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Is it true, or just a rumor, that Obama’s buddy and biggest contributor George Soros has a large investment in Brazilian oil? And, the Obama Admin. has loaned Soros’ Co. $2 billion to drill offshore Brazil? And, they need oil drilling rigs to go to Brazil? This timely moratorium leads companies to send rigs to Brazil.