Offshore Drilling Oil: Developing An Energy Plan

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Offshore Drilling
Introduction
Jacqueline Savitz says that “if the president tasked a commission with developing an energy plan that would allow us to forgo addition through clean energy, efficiency and conservation, we wouldn’t need to take a huge risk that we take every time we permit drilling. When you look at the cost and try to compare it to the benefits to the American people, it is very difficult to justify drilling offshore” (Billitteri 9). When business companies use this technology, they increase water and air pollution in the environment, but they don’t care about what it causes in our environment. They just want to make a lot of money. This technology is very risky for our environment and causes disasters. Large oil companies destroy the US environment. So, to prevent damage to the environment, business strategies must include strict regulations.
Fixing major flaws in the management and regulation of oil exploration requires technical experience and training, but the Minerals Management Service (MMS) was only formed as an agency that not only lacked trained personnel, but also the resources necessary to execute its mandate. There should be trained staff in petroleum engineering that will ensure that offshore oil drilling is conducted in an environmentally sustainable and safe manner. MMS was formed as a new agency, but retained the same staff, who lacked the needed technical knowhow. It was clear that by 2011, accident rates arising from offshore drilling were several folds higher in the US compared to those that happened in the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia (Mace). This was attributed to the effective rules that had been enacted following such accidents. Following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, MMS was diffused into parts and separating the department for revenue collection from the oversight office to address the problem of conflict of interest. However, such a strategy has maimed its activities as personnel training, access to technology and other regulation apparatus are poorly served.
Apart from business strategies among the players in offshore oil drilling, strict regulations, such as those in countries such as the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia need to be enacted. For instance, the UK offshore gas and oil industry is undergoing rapid changes. While it is a mature industry, the UK waters hold gas and oil reserves equivalent to those extracted since the beginning of 1973, making it a necessity to have sophisticated technologies to extract oil such as offshore drilling. It can be conceived that the accident rates have significantly improved since 1988 when the country experienced the Piper Alpha disaster. However, since the nation is sensitive to ensuring safe workplaces and sustainable environment, strict regulations have been maintained by bodies such as the Health Safety Executive which has a regulatory role in ensuring the offshore gas and oil industry is sustainable (HSE.gov.uk). In Canada, the Canada Oil and Gas Operations Act controls all the activities that involve the exploration, production, manufacturing and transporting gas and oil in areas under the federal government such as the continental shelf and territorial sea. However, regions under the provision government are not regulated (Government of Canada). Australia as a state also has stricter laws that govern the exploration and processing of gas and oil. According to The Law Library of Congress, the Offshore Petroleum and Greenhouse Gas Storage Act 2006 is particularly the primary law that authorizes any operation of companies with an interest to explore and recover oil in offshore areas.
In the UK, there are specific government policies to control unconventional exploration of oil and companies are subject to onshore laws and requirements. Particularly, there should be a Statement of Environmental Awareness to be submitted by explorers to accompany the license applications. On January 26, 2015, the Environmental Audit Committee released a report on the impact fracking on the environment and supplied an automatic ban on Fracking in the United Kingdom (Mace et al). While the proposed ban was criticized, the Infrastructure Act 2015 that was enforced on February 2015 placed several restrictions on fracking. These regulations provided that companies ensure that groundwater methane levels be closely monitored for a period of not less than 12 months prior to fracking operations. Fracking was also barred within the protected sources of groundwater to protect both agricultural and domestic water supplies. Fracking is also illegal within protected areas to protect National Parks and World Heritage sites. Strict regulations, such as those in the UK will be instrumental in protecting the Americans from unsustainable offshore oil drilling that has caused problems to the environment and the workers.
In order to prevent damage to the United States environment, the agency with the mandate to police offshore oil drilling should distant itself from the industry it is in charge of. Following the blowing out of the BP oil spill, a new federal agency was formed a year later and a new director set to maintain even stricter rules and keep a distance away from the industry which it regulates. The agency was initially run by the MMS, and the former bosses of the agency confessed that things were yet to be fixed for the body to exercise independence. It might take a long time before such regulatory bodies achieve the required independence to execute their functions in a diligent manner and minimize environmental hazards and harm to workers. The agency is increasingly opening new avenues for the exploration of offshore oil. Even after the overhaul of the former agency, the oil industry and those supporting them from the Congress accused the former President Obama, citing that it was one of the means of discouraging the development of offshore oil exploration efforts. According to Broder and Krause, in 2011, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, an agency supposed to watch over the management of oil resources had only made cosmetic strides in its mandate and remained supportive to the people it was meant to regulate, according to environmentalists.
While the government should be in support of environmental protection from rich drilling companies making profits, the battle to ban offshore oil drilling has remained frail from the government side. Government regulatory bodies, experts from the oil industry, as well as the environmentalists seldom agree on most issues, but following the BP gulf oil spill, many of these players have claimed that offshore oil dr...