BP spill report, Bromwich decision on future imminent

The Interior Department’s top offshore drilling regulator said a major Interior-U.S. Coast Guard report on their joint probe of last year's BP oil spill is “imminent” — and so is an announcement about his own future.

Michael Bromwich, the director of Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE), said Tuesday that the major federal probe of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster is in its “final stages” and that a report is on the cusp of release.

BOEMRE intends to follow the report with a preliminary rulemaking notice that spells out plans to further beef up requirements around blowout prevention and other drilling safety standards.

Bromwich’s comments at the Center for Strategic and International Studies come two weeks before the formal completion of the overhaul of the scandal-plagued Minerals Management Service, which was reorganized and recast as BOEMRE beginning last year.

BOEMRE on Oct. 1 will split into two separate agencies: a Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) that will enforce safety and environmental rules and a Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) that will manage resource development matters, such as leasing and environmental analysis.

It remains unclear what role Bromwich — a former Justice Department inspector general — might have after the split occurs. He said Tuesday he plans to make an announcement later this week or early next week that will “bear on my future.”

He noted that “we have accomplished a lot,” but also emphasized that regulators can’t stand still. “Our work will never be done and that is part of the lesson that we have learned from Deepwater Horizon,” Bromwich said.

“The work will never be done and, obviously, I will not be around forever,” Bromwich said.

He also had tough words for industry trade associations that have attacked his agency over what they allege is an unduly slow pace of offshore permitting in the wake of the BP spill.

From his speech Tuesday:

Not everyone ... is willing to see the facts as they are, nor to appreciate the level of effort of our personnel, nor to recognize that additional requirements designed to enhance the safety of offshore operations and protection of offshore operations mean that plan and permit approvals do not proceed at the same pace as they did in the past. I continue to be disappointed to see politically-motivated, erroneous reports and commentaries, sponsored by various industry associations and groups, criticizing the bureau for allegedly “slow-walking” permits and plans. That is a phrase we see repeated over and over again, and it is simply not true.

Bromwich also said that oil-and-gas companies bear much responsibility for the pace of permitting, noting that “flawed and incomplete applications are a significant source of delays in the process.”

He said:

Operators need to stop turning in applications with missing or incomplete information, or that completely lack information about subsea containment. We are still receiving applications that use cookie-cutter templates. For example, we have had cases in which we received an application from an operator that detail their plans to drill Well A. The operator then submitted another application to drill Well B, except that the application included the specifications for Well A — they simply cut-and-pasted the information. This is unacceptable, and we will obviously not approve an application with such blatant errors.