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6 years after BP disaster, Obama administration thinks it has a way to prevent future spills

6 years after BP disaster, Obama administration thinks it has a way to prevent future spills

By on 14 Apr 2016commentsShare

Next Wednesday marks the sixth anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon spill, the BP gusher that killed 11 workers and released at least 4 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. On Thursday, the Obama administration finalized a set of regulations that will help ensure we never have to witness this kind of disaster again — or so the administration claims. But environmental experts have real concerns about the rule’s rigor and implementation.

The new rule — the result of years of investigations by the Department of Interior, the Department of Homeland Security, and the National Academy of Engineering — will tighten standards for blowout preventers (the type of device that failed spectacularly in 2010). It will also strengthen the design of other offshore well elements, including wellheads and the steel casings used in construction.

Speaking to press on Thursday, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell cited the complexity of oil drilling technology as one of the reasons why the regulations took six years to compose. And learning from the blowout was a part of taking time “to do this right,” she said.

“As offshore oil and gas production continue to grow every year and our dependence on foreign oil continues to decline, we owe it to the American people to ensure we are developing these resources responsibly and safely,” said Jewell, who was once a petroleum engineer in Oklahoma.

Asked point blank on a press call if the blowout preventers will be fail-safe, Brian Salerno, director of the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, said he couldn’t give a conclusive answer. “We do believe this is a significant increase in the level of safety,” he said.

The new regulations incorporate several existing industry standards, produced by the likes of the American Petroleum Institute. API’s reaction to the announcement has been relatively calm.

But environmentalists have found much more to criticize.

A major concern is how rigorous the rule is around severing capability, the ability of blowout preventers to seal a pipe or wellbore by cutting through the pipe or casing in the event of a leak.

Liz Birnbaum, former director of the Minerals Management Service and an expert in offshore energy development, also pointed to the long phase-in periods that appear in the proposed regulations. “The rule says that they have three more years to set up real-time monitoring [of oil-well safety by onshore personnel],” Birnbaum told Grist. “Which is just insane.” She pointed to the fact that BP was able to set up real-time monitoring in less time than that after the Deepwater Horizon spill. “It doesn’t take three years.”

Environmental groups worry about providing too much flexibility for industry players, too. The only solution, Director of Environment America’s Stop Drilling Program Rachel Richardson said, “is to transition away from dirty fuels altogether.”

With respect to blowout preventers, Birnbaum argues that industry is being given too much temporal wiggle room to update their technology. In drilling operations, companies aren’t currently required to install parts that center the drill pipe during severing operations — which was exactly the problem during the Deepwater Horizon spill. The regulations would require them to do so, but not for another seven years.

Before the seven years are up, the Gulf of Mexico may be open for another 10 offshore leases, based on Obama’s proposed five-year offshore drilling plan. According to Birnbaum, “Another seven years is seven years too long.”

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6 years after BP disaster, Obama administration thinks it has a way to prevent future spills

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Aussies open wallets to save climate advisers from new prime minister

Aussies open wallets to save climate advisers from new prime minister

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Down Under is going back in time.

Tony Abbott, Australia’s new climate-denying prime minister, is wasting no time in driving the country backwards on environmental policy — in a metaphorical diesel-chugging logging truck.

But his draconian climate policies don’t appear to be as popular with big business as he’d hoped, and a climate advisory body he tried to kill may come back even stronger, thanks to some of his more enlightened countrymen and women.

Within his first few weeks on the job, Abbott scrapped top-level ministerial jobs that separately oversaw science and climate change policy and dismantled a government climate change commission. He wants to remove some of the world’s tallest forests from the list of World Heritage areas, potentially opening up hundreds of thousands of pristine acres for mining and logging. And he has promised to eradicate the country’s carbon tax.

Amid this carnage, horrified Aussies have begun donating to fund the Climate Commission to keep it operating as a nonprofit. From a story posted Wednesday on the online news site Crikey:

The commission has been reborn as the Climate Council and is now funded by public donations. It had raised $420,000 from 8500 donors as of 9am today (the website only opened to donations 33 hours previously). This should fund the Climate Council for at least six months, probably longer.

So it’s a goer financially.

The Crikey story argues that the commission might actually work better as a nonprofit since it will be freed from the shackles of rules that limited what it could say about government policy. Then again, it’s unlikely that Abbott’s government could give a toss what the group has to say about anything.

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Phillip Minnis

Tony Abbott

Meanwhile, Abbott is lacking the kind of support from big businesses that he might have counted on to help him ram anti-carbon tax legislation through a hostile senate. From Bloomberg:

While business groups such as the Minerals Council of Australia have criticized the carbon price as a “dead weight on the economy,” few individual companies have spoken up to endorse Tony Abbott’s plan to scrap what he calls a carbon tax, said Peter Castellas, chief executive officer for the Melbourne-based institute, which surveyed about 200 of the country’s largest emitters before the Sept. 7 election. It plans to publish a study later this year on the costs of repealing carbon trading in Australia.

“Those conversations are yet to be had by liable entities in Australia,” Castellas said yesterday at the Carbon Forum Asia in Bangkok. “Lots of money has already been invested. Those costs have already been sunk.”

As an arch conservative, Abbott’s mantra is predictably pro-business and anti-regulation. But the uncertainty that his rise to Australia’s top job has cast over carbon pricing is not the kind of thing that corporations like. “The longer this uncertainty lasts, the bigger the problem for Australian companies,” Ingo Tschach, head of market analysis for Tschach Solutions in Karlsruhe, Germany, told Bloomberg.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Climate & Energy

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Aussies open wallets to save climate advisers from new prime minister

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Azomite (Granular) – Organic Natural Source of Minerals and Trace Elements for Outdoor and Indoor Plants – Azomite from Bloom Brothers (2 pound, Granulated)

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We’re on the verge of a scary undersea gold rush

We’re on the verge of a scary undersea gold rush

Two of the most popular shows on cable television right now are about digging for gold. Exciting! Gold! One of these shows, the Discovery Channel’s Bering Sea Gold, focuses on the human difficulties and dangers of digging for gold under the sea floor off the coast of Alaska.

This pursuit of material mineral riches seems like it might be a bad idea for these individuals, especially that dude with the bloody hand. But when the gold is even deeper under the sea, digging it up could be an even worse idea. And at today’s inflated gold prices, digging up the ocean will be as lucrative as it could be destructive.

National Geographic’s feature story on deep-sea mineral mining sets up a scary proposition for the Solwara 1 site in Papua New Guinea especially, where one company hopes to blaze a path into the deep with new mining technologies that could allow for the scooping up of billions if not trillions of dollars worth of deep-sea minerals.

[A] fledgling deep-sea mining industry faces a host of challenges before it can claim the precious minerals, from the need for new mining technology and serious capital to the concerns of conservationists, fishers, and coastal residents.

The roadblocks are coming into view in the coastal waters of Papua New Guinea, where the seafloor contains copper, zinc, and gold deposits worth hundreds of millions of dollars and where one company, Nautilus Minerals, hopes to launch the world’s first deep-sea mining operation …

Samantha Smith, Nautilus’s vice president for corporate social responsibility, says that ocean floor mining is safer, cleaner, and more environmentally friendly than its terrestrial counterpart.

“There are no mountains that need to be removed to get to the ore body,” she says. “There’s a potential to have a lot less waste … No people need to be displaced. Shouldn’t we as a society consider such an option?”

But mining a mile below the sea’s surface, where pressure is 160 times greater than on land and where temperatures swing from below freezing to hundreds of degrees above boiling, is trickier and more expensive than mining on terra firma.

It’s trickier in part because the same undersea hydrothermal vent spots that are so full of gold and other fancy mineral deposits are also full of awesome sea creatures like seven-foot-long tubeworms and giant snails.

Conservationists also say they want to know more about the vent ecosystems and how they will be mined.

“The whole world is new to the concept of deep-sea mining,” says Helen Rosenbaum, coordinator of the Deep Sea Mining Campaign, a small activist group in Australia that campaigns against mining the Solwara 1 site.

“This is going to be the world’s first exploitation of these kinds of deep resources. The impacts are not known, and we need to apply precautionary principles,” she says. “If we knew what the impacts were going to be, we could engage in a broad-based debate.” …

A report released in November 2012 by the Deep Sea Mining Campaign ties exploratory pre-mining activities and equipment testing by Nautilus to “cloudy water, dead tuna, and a lack of response of sharks to the age-old tradition of shark calling.”

Shark calling is a religious ritual in which Papua New Guineans lure sharks from the deep and catch them by hand.

In the past 10 years, a dozen exploratory permits have been issued to governments around the world for drilling into international waters. Any over/under bets on when this all goes horribly wrong?

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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We’re on the verge of a scary undersea gold rush

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