Nations Going Global on Drilling Standards

Nations Going Global on Drilling Standards

Friday, April 15, 2011
Houston Chronicle
by Jennifer A. Dlouhy

Drilling regulators from a dozen countries on Thursday agreed to form a working group that could eventually develop global offshore drilling standards.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar suggested the idea at the end of a daylong summit on offshore drilling safety that focused on learning lessons from last year's Deepwater Horizon disaster, including a need for better ways to rein in runaway underwater wells.

"The working group can help us figure what the best organization is" and "can help us develop global protocols for oil and gas development," Salazar said.

The current set-up -- a patchwork of standards that vary from ocean to ocean and country to country -- doesn't recognize the reality that the same companies drilling in the Gulf of Mexico are also drilling off Brazil, Angola and Norway, Salazar said.

"I feel confident in what we are doing with the Gulf of Mexico, but the oil and gas industry is a global industry," Salazar said. And, he added, "it's one ocean in this Earth."

"When we get to the second anniversary of the Macondo spill, hopefully we will be able to be working on global standards that go beyond just our own backyard," Salazar said.

The representatives at Thursday's summit -- including those from the United Kingdom, the European Union, Russian Federation and Australia -- tentatively agreed to meet again in Oslo, Norway, in 2012, on the Gulf spill's second anniversary.

Salazar tasked his offshore drilling chief, Michael Brom-wich, with developing the framework for the international working group within 90 days.

One notable absence in the planned collaboration -- at least initially -- and at Thursday's international summit is Cuba, which expects five wells to be drilled off its coast in the next two years. Salazar said the U.S. was concerned about the potential drilling 60 miles off Florida, within the loop current that travels up the East Coast.

The drilling regulators at Thursday's summit stressed that the blowout at BP's failed Macondo well is shaking up government oversight of coastal oil and gas exploration far beyond the Gulf of Mexico.

Geoffrey Podger, chief of the United Kingdom's health and safety executive, called the blowout of BP's Macondo well a seminal event, like the 1988 explosion on the Piper Alpha platform in the North Sea that killed 167 people.

"The accident was a watershed for the oil industry," said Mario Gabriel Budebo, Mexico's undersecretary of hydrocarbons, who has been meeting with U.S. officials to try to harmonize standards for drilling in the Gulf.

One of the biggest post-Macondo lessons, Budebo said, was "the need for drilling and development plans to include design of emergency procedures" for countering blowouts.

Jan de Jong, the Netherlands' inspector general of mines, stressed that "it is absolutely necessary to raise standards in industry."

"This accident is not unique for deep-sea drilling in general, nor BP, nor for the Gulf of Mexico," Jong said. "It could have happened anywhere."

Norway's top petroleum and energy minister, Per Rune Henriksen, said he was dismayed by the inability to cap blowouts as evidenced by the Gulf spill that took 85 days to contain and the Montara blowout near Australia that leaked for 74 days before it was finally killed in November 2009.

Those crude-containment failures are "highly unsatisfactory," Henriksen said. "This is an area where the industry must provide solutions."