The attached letter to the General Accountability Office (GAO) asserts that there were “deeply entrenched ethical issues and conflicts of interest within the former Minerals Management Service (MMS),” and implies that these issues were among the factors contributing to the tragic Macondo well blowout.
I retired from MMS shortly before the Macondo well blew out on April 20, 2020, and testified before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on May 11, 2010. My comments on MMS employee ethics still stand and are reiterated below:
I also want to express my disappointment in certain media comments directed at my former MMS colleagues. These comments have not only been ill-informed and unsubstantiated, but malicious. Without hesitation, I can tell you that MMS regulatory personnel–inspectors, engineers, scientists, and others–are 100% committed to their safety and pollution prevention mission. MMS inspectors are themselves exposed to risks every day when they fly offshore and inspect facilities. MMS personnel have repeatedly made personal sacrifices to support the regulatory mission. After Ivan, Katrina, Rita, Gustav, and Ike, MMS employees worked to restore oil and gas production essential to our economy, even when their personal lives had been disrupted by the onshore impacts of these hurricanes. These personnel work under strict ethics standards, and despite a few isolated and highly publicized incidents that occurred more than four years ago, conduct themselves with the highest degree of professionalism. While a critical review of the entire offshore regulatory regime is necessary and appropriate, unsubstantiated accusations and personal attacks are not.
The comprehensive Chief Counsel’s Report, National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, was the only inquiry to consider whether ethical lapses were a contributing factor to the blowout. In the “Regulatory Observations” chapter, the Chief Counsel addressed ethics concerns directly (p. 261):
“In recent years various bodies have concluded that certain MMS offices and programs have violated ethical rules or guidelines. In the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, some questioned whether ethical lapses played any role in causing the blowout. The Chief Counsel‘s team found no evidence of any such lapses.“
This blog closely followed the Macondo blowout. I have read all of the investigation reports and many of the court documents. I also served on the defense team for Bob Kaluza, the BP Well Site Leader who was fully acquitted after being shamefully prosecuted in the wake of the blowout. My thoughts on the Macondo tragedy are summarized in a six part series.
Because of the false ethics narrative and scapegoating of MMS, experts who should have been directing the well control efforts, were pushed to the back of the bus shortly after the blowout began. Had that not been the case, I believe the top kill operation would not have been aborted in late May and the well would have been killed 48 days sooner, reducing the oil spill volume by at least 2.4 million bbls. (See the analysis by Dr. Mayank Tyagi and his colleagues at LSU.) Also, keep in mind that the USCG Incident Commander almost required BP to resume flow from the well after the capping stack successfully shut-in the well on 7/15/2010, and would have likely done so were it not for forceful input from an engineer from the former MMS.
The consolidation of BOEM and BSEE into a single bureau makes sense. As I previously commented:
This is an excellent step that many OCS program veterans have been advocating. In addition to the inefficiencies associated with overlapping and intertwined BOEM and BSEE responsibilities, the associated regulatory fragmentation is a significant safety risk factor.
The primary OCS functions including leasing, resource evaluation, economic analysis, permitting, inspection and enforcement, investigations, environmental assessment, spill response preparedness, promulgation of regulations, technology assessment, research,and decommissioning, are inextricably linked, cannot be effectively segmented, and should not be stovepiped.
Finally, with regard to the reorganization planning questions posed at the end of the attached letter, perhaps GAO should first consider the abrupt, unplanned termination of MMS. At a 2011 Ministerial Forum in Washington, an international offshore safety expert criticized that rash decision noting – “It took 87 days to stop the blowout, but only 30 days to get rid of the regulator.”
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