The Obama administration on Monday offered deepwater drillers a second round of clarification about how it expects them to comply with regulations put in place after BP's Macondo blowout and oil spill.
The US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement said in the five-page memo that it would reopen a public comment period for the safety rule adopted in October.
Industry groups have called the regulations confusing and blamed them for slowing down the issuance of drilling permits. The American Petroleum Institute said the latest clarification created a clearer, more efficient permitting process.
The document shed light on regulators' review of subsea containment devices, explaining that BOEM is conducting the evaluation on a well-by-well basis for each drilling permit application. BOEM, the Marine Well Containment Company and Helix Well Containment Group are developing software to test whether a capping stack could shut in specific wells without broaching the bores.
The software "facilitates well integrity calculations based on various factors including well design, geological characteristics, reservoir pressures and well-bore fluid gradients," it said.
BOEM said it would use the tool to categorize wells as those that could be shut in with full well-bore integrity; those where well-bore integrity might not be maintained but a breach of the seafloor is not likely; and those where well-bore integrity might not hold and a seafloor rupture is expected. Each designation comes with different repercussions during permitting.
The document also settled industry confusion about BOEM's guidance in December telling operators to interpret "should" in the rule as "must." API and other industry groups said the prior clarification created more confusion than the original language and could have led to unsafe operations.
Holly Hopkins, an API policy adviser, said the latest language gives operators clear directions.
"It basically says that if an operator is going to deviate from a 'shall' then they must ask for a departure," she said. "If they are going to deviate from a 'should' then they just have to maintain documentation on why they did not comply with the recommendation."
