STOCKHOLM — The U.S. government is not alone in ceding responsibility to the oil industry for the design of key safety features on offshore rigs, a trend coming under scrutiny worldwide following the deadly blowout in the Gulf of Mexico.
Across the globe, industry-driven regulation is the norm, not the exception – and critics are calling for a re-examination of a system that puts crucial safety decisions into the hands of corporations motivated by profit.
An Associated Press investigation shows other nations harvesting oil and gas from offshore fields, including Britain, Norway, Australia and Canada, have moved in the same direction: Governments set the general safety standards that must be met, but leave it to rig operators to work out the details.
The shift away from more heavy-handed regulation started about two decades ago and was based on the notion that oil companies best know the risks of offshore operations – and how to minimize them.
But the Deepwater Horizon explosion on April 20 and another platform incident in the Timor Sea off Australia last year have raised concerns that Big Oil has been given too much leeway to police itself.
‘Safety is a combination of regulation and compliance and both clearly need to be reviewed and tightened across industry everywhere in light of these respective blowouts,’ said Gilly Llewellyn of the World Wildlife Fund.
While the cause of the latest disaster remains unclear, U.S. lawmakers and President Barack Obama have vowed to reform the federal agency that oversees the offshore industry. Congressional hearings have revealed a lack of regulation covering safety aspects from cement casing surrounding well pipes to blowout preventers, the undersea safety mechanism that failed on the Deepwater Horizon.
The absence of detailed regulation is not unique to the U.S., officials said.
‘When it comes down to it, this kind of drilling is done in the same way more or less everywhere,’ said Per Holand, a Norwegian expert on offshore blowouts.
He added that some practices and standards are stricter outside the U.S. For example, Norway requires an acoustic backup system to trigger the blowout preventer remotely with sound pulses if the regular switch fails.
‘That’s also true in Brazil and off the east coast of Canada,’ Holand said, adding acoustic triggers are not widely used on American rigs. It’s unclear whether such a device would have made a difference in the April 20 incident.
Another difference is that Britain, Norway and Australia have separate agencies overseeing the revenue and safety aspects of the oil industry to avoid conflict of interest. In the U.S. the federal Minerals Management Service oversees both, something White House officials have vowed to change following the Gulf of Mexico blowout.
However, the practice of letting industry select the best safety measures is widespread. The system is referred to as ‘performance-based’ in some countries and ‘goal-oriented’ or ‘goal-setting’ in others.
It comes down to granting flexibility for oil companies to select the best technology and practices to ensure safety on their offshore installations, as long as they meet the regulator’s minimum standards.
‘Generally, goal-setting allows you to make improvements as technology develops without having to change the legislation,’ said Robert Wine, a spokesman for BP PLC, the company that owns the ruptured well that is releasing millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. ‘So it makes it a more flexible way of improving standards, improving performance.’
Britain’s offshore regulations require the operator to make sure that a well is built and maintained to ensure that there are no spills and that health and safety risks to workers ‘are as low as is reasonably practicable.’
It also requires the operator to ensure that suitable control equipment, including blowout preventer
