The Next Oil Spill : Five Needed Mandates to Head it Off

As the oil industry forges deeper into riskier waters and other frontiers, both companies and government overseers need to radically overhaul their approach to safety, concluded the U.S. commission appointed by President Obama to examine the causes of BP’s disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The seven-member commission agreed unanimously that the spill was not caused by the actions of one rogue player, but by a systemic failure born of years of complacency.

"In the past 20 years, exploration moved into deeper and deeper and riskier and riskier areas of the Gulf of Mexico, resulting in abundant revenues for private companies and the federal Treasury," said former Florida Senator Bob Graham, co-chairman of the panel.

Thanks to impressive technological advances, frequently compared to those of the U.S. space program, "we became lulled into a sense of inevitable success," he said.

"On April 20, after a long period of rolling the dice, our luck ran out," said Graham.

(From National Geographic magazine : "Is Another Deepwater Disaster Inevitable ?")

In its 400-page final report, presented as required within six months of the panel’s first meeting in July, the commission made numerous recommendations for both the industry and the government. All go well beyond the safety measures taken so far.

The panel’s other co-chairman, William Reilly, former administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, noted that there are industry plans for drilling as deep as 10,000 feet below the surface of the water, twice the depth of BP’s well. He said that current energy needs compel riskier exploration and development, because the world’s remaining petroleum resources are in more difficult terrain. "The reason we’re in deepwater is that’s where the oil is," said Reilly. "They are not only in deepwater, they are in deeper and deeper water."

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