Randall Luthi, president of the National Ocean Industries Association, praised the rule changes.
“The revisions develop a rule that reduces unnecessary burdens placed on industry, while still maintaining world-class safety and environmental protections,” he said in a statement. “We have a rule that is not a safety rollback, but instead incorporates modern technological advances.”
The earlier rules, written in 2016 during the administration of President Barack Obama, tightened controls on “blowout preventers,” devices that are intended to stop explosions in undersea oil and gas wells, and called for rig operators to have third parties certify that the safety devices worked under extreme conditions. In the Deepwater Horizon spill, a supposedly fail-safe blowout preventer ended up failing after a section of drill pipe buckled.
Nearly one million coastal and offshore seabirds are estimated to have died in the spill, which released 4.9 million barrels of oil into the sea. The accident led to the largest environmental settlement in the nation’s history, with the oil giant BP agreeing to pay $18.7 billion in civil penalties and damages to the federal government and affected states.
Environmentalists decried the final rule change.
“These rollbacks allow offshore oil companies to self-police and prioritize industry profits over safety,” said Diane Hoskins, the campaign director for offshore drilling at Oceana, an advocacy group. “This is a slap in the face to coastal communities and marine life that are most at risk from devastating oil spills.”
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