Tyler Priest: The Ties that Bind MMS and Big Oil
[Tyler Priest, clinical professor of business history and director of global studies at the University of Houston’s C.T. Bauer College of Business, is the author of “The Offshore Imperative: Shell Oil’s Search for Petroleum in Postwar America.” He is member of the Mineral Management Service’s Outer Continental Shelf Scientific Advisory Committee, an uncompensated panel that advises the agency’s Environmental Studies Branch.]
"There will be blame,” said “The Daily Show,” soon after the sinking of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico.
Politicians and pundits are indeed racing to cast blame for the failure to stop the blowout at BP’s Macondo well. It’s not that surprising, for the spill has become the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history.
The real regulatory problem is structural and common to all technologically innovative societies. The theme in the history of offshore oil — as in many businesses — is that technical advances regularly outrun organizations’ ability to manage associated risks and overwhelm the government’s oversight capabilities.
This has been demonstrated repeatedly — with the mobile drilling rig disasters during the 1950s and ’60s, and then with major blowouts at production platforms in the Santa Barbara channel in 1969 and in the Gulf of Mexico in 1970 and 1979. None, however, were as clearly enabled by misconduct at MMS.
Though new regulations and practices improved safety and environmental performance after the earlier disasters, MMS (which was created in 1982) and its predecessors have never been up to the tasks that they were assigned. They have always been underfunded, understaffed and overmatched....
Government reforms of oil drilling are certain to be issued in the months ahead. New regulations relating to well control are to be expected. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s announced reorganization of MMS into three agencies — to separate licensing, regulation and revenue management — is long overdue....
Read entire article at Politico
"There will be blame,” said “The Daily Show,” soon after the sinking of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico.
Politicians and pundits are indeed racing to cast blame for the failure to stop the blowout at BP’s Macondo well. It’s not that surprising, for the spill has become the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history.
The real regulatory problem is structural and common to all technologically innovative societies. The theme in the history of offshore oil — as in many businesses — is that technical advances regularly outrun organizations’ ability to manage associated risks and overwhelm the government’s oversight capabilities.
This has been demonstrated repeatedly — with the mobile drilling rig disasters during the 1950s and ’60s, and then with major blowouts at production platforms in the Santa Barbara channel in 1969 and in the Gulf of Mexico in 1970 and 1979. None, however, were as clearly enabled by misconduct at MMS.
Though new regulations and practices improved safety and environmental performance after the earlier disasters, MMS (which was created in 1982) and its predecessors have never been up to the tasks that they were assigned. They have always been underfunded, understaffed and overmatched....
Government reforms of oil drilling are certain to be issued in the months ahead. New regulations relating to well control are to be expected. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s announced reorganization of MMS into three agencies — to separate licensing, regulation and revenue management — is long overdue....