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Interior’s drilling chief staying on for now
Interior Department offshore drilling chief Michael Bromwich will remain with the department after its ocean energy branch formally splits into two agencies next month.
Bromwich will head the new Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) until a permanent director can be found, Interior announced Friday.
BOEMRE is dividing into two separate branches next month: BSEE, which will enforce safety and environmental rules, and a Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) that will manage resource development matters such as leasing, environmental analysis and review of oil industry exploration plans.
Interior also announced that current BOEMRE senior adviser Tommy P. Beaudreau will head BOEM.
The split is the culmination of the overhaul of Interior's scandal-plagued Minerals Management Service, which followed the BP disaster. It’s part of an effort to remove what Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Bromwich called inherently conflicting missions at the old MMS, which collected billions of dollars in offshore revenues, handled offshore leasing and tried to enforce drilling standards.
The revenue collection functions were already moved completely outside of BOEMRE last year.
The announcement that Bromwich will be interim director of BSEE ends weeks of speculation over whether he would stick around after Oct. 1, when the two new agencies are formally created.
Bromwich, who was the Justice Department’s inspector general in the 1990s, was with the firm Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson just prior to joining BOEMRE in June of 2010. E2 profiled him in May.
Beaudreau was also a partner at Fried Frank before Bromwich recruited him to help overhaul Interior’s troubled offshore branch.
Beaudreau “played an integral role in implementing the Bureau’s aggressive reform agenda with respect to the regulation of offshore oil and gas development and the reorganization of the former MMS,” according to Interior’s announcement.
Like Bromwich, Beaudreau focused on investigations of corporations and law enforcement agencies, among other practice areas while at Fried Frank.
“Director Bromwich is a top-flight manager with a track record of solving problems and implementing reform, in the private sector, in the public sector, and his time at BOEMRE. Tommy Beaudreau has been an engine behind the many changes BOEMRE has made to raise the bar for safety and environmental protection in energy operations — he will be a strong, tireless, and effective leader for BOEM,” Salazar said in a statement Friday.
