Regulators in the Trump administration are proposing to roll back safety measures put in place after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, a revision that would reduce the role of government in offshore oil production and return more responsibility to private companies, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, which regulates offshore oil and gas drilling, estimates the proposed changes could save the industry more than $900 million over the next 10 years and reverse some risk-reduction measures that drillers consider burdensome.
Among the changes, the proposed rule would relax requirements to stream real-time data on oil-production operations to facilities onshore, where they currently are available for review by regulators. It also would strike a provision requiring that third-party inspectors of critical equipment—like the blowout preventer that failed in the Deepwater Horizon case—be certified by BSEE.
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