Interior drilling regulators prepare new penalties over BP spill

The Interior Department’s offshore drilling branch is preparing to issue a second round of regulatory violation notices to companies involved in last year’s BP oil spill, a top official said Monday.

Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) Director Michael Bromwich said the so-called Incidents of Noncompliance notices could be sent to BP, Transocean and Halliburton in the next couple of weeks.

The notices that companies allegedly violated offshore drilling regulations, a step toward collecting penalties, stem from the 2010 well blowout and rig explosion that killed 11 men and dumped millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

In October BSEE issued an initial set of violation notices to BP, which owned the ill-fated Macondo well, Deepwater Horizon rig owner Transocean, and Halliburton, which performed cement work on the failed well.

The violations stemmed from the final investigative report by an Interior-U.S. Coast Guard team that detailed a series of missteps by the companies.

Bromwich, who is departing this year, told reporters Monday that the upcoming notices stem from in-depth reviews of information about the drilling of the Macondo well.

“My understanding is that the new regulatory violations will be the result of that deeper dive into some of the underlying materials that were not specifically addressed or discussed in the joint agency report,” Bromwich said.

He is stepping down as BSEE chief at the end of November and will remain with Interior as an adviser to Secretary Ken Salazar through December.

Bromwich — a former Justice Department official who was brought on in 2010 to steer the post-spill regulatory overhaul — has repeatedly said that maximum civil penalties are far too low to serve as a deterrent and called for Congress to boost them.

On Monday, Bromwich said regulators are also looking at how to “truncate” the process to speed up the time between issuance of violations to issuance of penalties to collection, which he said can take a year or more.

Bromwich said the regulators are looking for “ways to shrink the process without depriving companies of their due process rights.”