The Obama administration plans to announce new regulations on offshore gas and oil drilling intended to prevent another incident like the BP Gulf oil spill.
An announcement could come Monday, the New York Times reported.
The regulation targets blowout preventers, devices on undersea oil wells which, according to the Times, are the “last line of protection to stop explosions in undersea oil and gas wells.”
The 2010 oil spill was caused by an explosion on an oil rig and resulted in the death of 11 men and millions of gallons of crude oil spewed into the Gulf of Mexico.
The blowout preventer on the Macondo well, 40 miles off the Louisiana coastline, failed when natural gas rising from the well exploded beneath the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig. With few means of plugging a hole thousands of feet underwater, the well spewed oil for 87 days.
An independent federal review board found last year that the pipe running through the blowout preventer buckled around the time of the explosion, the Wall Street Journal reported, blocking the preventer from being able to do its job and seal off the pipe. Part of the preventer also punctured the pipe.
Regulations on offshore drilling are imposed by the U.S. Department of the Interior.
“We’re coming on five years, and we’ve been working tirelessly in the regulation division since it [the Gulf oil spill] happened,” Allyson Anderson, associate director at the Interior Department’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, told the Times. “We’ve doubled down on building a culture of safety.”
Despite additional regulations since the Gulf oil spill, accidents and injuries per oil rig have increased by roughly 7 percent. The number of oil-producing wells has, however, dropped by 20 percent, the Times said.
President Obama is also currently taking action to open up more area in federal water off the southeastern shore for oil and gas drilling.
