 Obama picks legal enforcer to fix oil oversight Washington (AFP) June 15, 2010 - US President Barack Obama on Tuesday nominated Michael Bromwich, a lawyer with a reputation for fixing broken government bureaucracies, to repair government oversight of the oil industry. Obama picked Bromwich, a former Justice Department Inspector General, to head the Minerals Management Service (MMS), an agency slammed as being too close to the oil giants it regulates, in the wake of the Gulf of Mexico disaster. "For a decade or more, the cozy relationship between the oil companies and the federal agency was allowed to go unchecked," Obama said in a statement. "That allowed drilling permits to be issued in exchange not for safety plans, but assurances of safety from oil companies. That cannot and will not happen anymore," Obama said. Bromwich will be charged with leading an effort to reform the MMS and will be asked to frame a new regulatory structure to replace what the White House termed "inadequate practices" with a "gold standard" approach. His work will also be based on a preliminary review of what happened when the BP-operated Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on April 20, rupturing an undersea oil well and sparking the worst US environmental disaster. Elizabeth Birnbaum, the previous head of the MMS, which operates under the auspices of the Interior Department, resigned last month, paying the price for the Gulf spill. |
The controlled burn method, deployed at the direction of the US federal government, would expand total spill containment capacity to 20,000 to 28,000 barrels per day, a team of top US officials said in their latest assessment of how much crude is spewing into the Gulf.
The ship, called the Q4000, does not have enough capacity to store oil and continuously barging it to shore would involve "significant safety risks" due to the sheer number of vessels in the area, officials said.
But they said the vessel will perform a critical function close to the ruptured wellhead by managing control systems for a critical valve known as the blowout preventer.
The Minerals Management Service, a government agency tasked with overseeing offshore oil drilling, has authorized BP to burn up to 12,000 barrels of oil and flare up to 50 million cubic feet per day through the Q4000. BP expects to burn oil for four to six weeks.
While burning of the oil siphoned up to the Q4000 would be gradually phased out, officials said they expected to continue flaring natural gas until relief wells are drilled and the flow has been stopped. That work is supposed to be completed in August.
BP said the burner used for the operation has "very high" combustion efficiency and is not expected to cause much smoking. Respirators have been distributed to personnel working in the area.
About 15,000 barrels of oil a day are being siphoned up to a another ship -- the Discoverer Enterprise - via a mile-long pipe leading from a containment cap on the fractured wellhead. Officials say that system can pull up to 18,000 barrels a day.
BP deployed the containment cap -- dubbed a lower marine riser pipe -- on June 3, after several unsuccessful bids to cap the leak spewing into the Gulf since an April 30 explosion on the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon rig.
The company has outlined plans to bring in additional ships and equipment to boost its total collection capacity to 40,000-53,000 barrels per day by the end of June and 60,000-80,000 barrels per day by mid-July.
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