Gulf Oil Spill: Minerals Management Service Out of the Way, BP Monitored More Closely

Operating under stricter oversight and review than when it was drilling virtually without government oversight, BP's cleanup and mitigation efforts in the Gulf are subject to continual scrutiny, approvals and review.

One of the terrible ironies of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is that both BP and the federal government are faced by an unprecedented deepwater spill being fought with outdated mitigation efforts that are clumsy and outmoded.

Each step in the cleanup and recovery has been subject to far greater scrutiny than BP ever faced while extracting oil from the gulf with deepwater wells, and yet the scrutiny is being applied to methods that don't address the spill at the source: the destroyed wellhead and riser pipe, a gushing flow of oil below the ocean's surface.

The now-shamed Minerals Management Service is much to blame for the ever-worsening catastrophe in the gulf. Operating under an inherent conflict of interest, the MMS granted countless environmental waivers for BP's rigs in the gulf, yet never required that the oil industry develop groundbreaking methods for fighting oil spills below the surface of the ocean. The lack of regulations have rendered woefully inadequate BP's use of dispersants, skimmers, in situ burning and boom. All are near quaint oil spill methods meant to mitigate surface oil spills, not 20,000 barrel-a-day flows a mile below the ocean's surface.