腾讯游戏成都工作室:The Gulf oil-spill commission’s report: Clean...

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Cleaning up a mess

Jan 11th 2011, 18:51 by The Economist online

HAVING last week released its findings on how the Deepwater Horizon was lost, on January 11th America’s national Oil Spill Commission released its findings on what happened afterwards—and on how to make sure it doesn’t happen again. As the commission points out, the damage done fell short of some of the worst expectations and conjectures, with much of the oil kept out at sea by winds and currents. But in terms of economic loss, health impacts and social, as well as environmental, damage it was still a disaster for a set of states that have had more than their fair share of such things.

While the commission found the blame to sit with BP and its contractors Halliburton and Transocean, it also found that government oversight was badly compromised. The agency in charge of promoting the expansion of drilling was also in charge of keeping it safe. Its officials did not have the necessary experience or training for dealing with the ever deeper and more technologically challenging installations they had to oversee. And it had a budget that did not come close to keeping up with the expansion of what it was meant to be doing. Nor had there been adequate planning by companies or by government for what to do in the case of such a gigantic spill.

The administration has already moved towards separating the regulation of offshore drilling from its encouragement. The commission recommends further steps, with the creation of a new independent agency with authority over all aspects of offshore drilling safety. And as well as suggesting this new architecture for regulation, it also recommends a new approach to the task itself, one more like that seen in the North Sea.

Making a case for the "safety case"
After the 1980 loss of the Alexander Kielland, a Norwegian rig, and the 1988 explosion of the Piper Alpha platform, which between them claimed 300 lives, both the Norwegian and British regulators changed the way that they approached their job. Instead of putting all the burden on the regulator to decide before the fact what would count as safe and what would not, an increasing responsibility was put on the companies developing fields to convince the regulator that their plans for a particular well and a particular rig were reasonable and responsible: to make a “safety case” for their proposal. Such a case should include plans for what to do if things go wrong, plans that were signally lacking in the case of Deepwater Horizon.

The commission wants to see this sort of approach, which by its nature has to keep up with changing technologies on the rigs, to the regulation of facilities and operations under American jurisdiction. (A recent report by a committee of Britain’s House of Commons recommended various tightenings in the North Sea regulations as a response to the lessons of the Deepwater Horizon, but not a change in the basic approach.) The commission also notes that the American Petroleum Institute (API) has in the past steadfastly resisted moves towards something like the “safety case” approach. This is presumably part of the reason that that the commission recommends that the industry set up a new “Safety Institute” to establish and enforce standards of excellence, one which, unlike the API, does not concern itself with industry advocacy as well as  the setting of standards. The Institute of Nuclear Power Operations, created by the power industry after the Three Mile Island disaster, is offered up as a model.

The API has already criticised the report for casting doubt on a whole industry on the basis of a single incident, and looks likely to resist a new independent body modelled on an approach from a much smaller industry: America has a lot more, and more various, wells than nuclear reactors. According to Politico.com, the API's president, Jack Gerard, recently noted to reporters that, since INPO’s inception, not a single new nuclear-power plant has been built in America.

Safety institute or no, there will be no such industry shutdown with oil. The commission’s report is critical, but it does not make a case for stopping deepwater drilling; indeed the fact that deepwater drilling can be carried out safely is one of the key messages of the report, according to the commission's co-chair, William Reilly. But it is mindful of the fact that new frontiers for offshore development pose challenges that might not be met just by the improvements it has in mind for the industry as a whole. The Arctic is a particular worry, and the commission points to a need for a better Coastguard search-and-rescue capability there, as well as more thorough plans for the containment of leaks, if it is to be developed safely.

The commission wants industry to pay for the different and better regulation that it thinks are needed, arguing that it is only just to have the costs of regulation met through the costs of leases. It also has plans for the money that BP is going to have to pay out in fines under the Clean Water Act. Some 80% of that money, it says—which means at least $3.5 billion, and as much as $17 billion should BP be judged to have been grossly negligent—should go to restoration programmes in the Gulf of Mexico.

The commission’s ambition here goes far beyond seeking to put right the damage done by the oil last year. It wants a strategy to be set that might deal with wetland loss and the effects of agricultural runoff, responsible for a persistent oxygen-free “dead zone” in the western Gulf, as well as damage done by the energy industries over the years. And such a strategy, in Mr Reilly’s words, will require investment “commensurate to the challenge, to the national importance of the Gulf, and to the degree to which the federal government has contributed to its decline.”