Today, more than 50 percent of Gulf oil production comes from ultra-deep wells drilled in 4,500 feet or more of water, compared with about 4,000 feet for Deepwater Horizon.

Inspections and safety checks by BSEE have also declined some 13 percent between 20 and there have been nearly 40 percent less enforcement activities in that time compared to previous years, according to Lee Ashley’s analysis. Most notably, in 2019 the Trump administration finalized rollbacks of several components of the 2016 rules, including the independent safety certification for blowout protectors and bi-weekly testing. But many of those rules, as well as other safety practices put in place after the disaster, have been weakened in recent years.

Among those rules was one that required blowout protectors-the piece that had failed at Deepwater Horizon-to be inspected by a third party, rather than self-certified by the drilling companies. “Then Deepwater happened and burst that set of assumptions.”īSEE announced a new set of safety rules for offshore operations in 2016. “Before Deepwater, there was this mentality that had set in in the 1990s and 2000s, that the oil and gas industry, as it was going farther offshore, was capable of self-regulating,” says Matt Lee Ashley, a researcher at the Center for American Progress. “Even in times of low prices like today, offshore just keeps going on,” says Gregory Upton, Jr., an energy economist at Louisiana State University.Ī new agency, the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE), was created to track and enforce offshore drilling safety issues, something that had been handled by the same agency that approved leases to oil companies. Before plummeting demand from the coronavirus pandemic drove already-low oil prices lower, the Gulf of Mexico was producing as much crude oil as it had in years. Pipelines-26,000 miles of them-connect wells to the processing infrastructure that lines the coast. “This is a marathon, not a sprint.” Can this kind of spill happen again?Ībout 17 percent of the U.S.’s total crude oil production comes from offshore projects in the Gulf. “We’re just to the point now where we have enough data to recognize things we missed earlier, and there’s still a lot we don’t know,” says Samantha Joye, a marine scientist at the University of Georgia. “So basically we’re back to where we were in 2010, in terms of regulatory environment.”Īnd in some ways, more is known now than ever before about the Gulf and how the spill affected its ecosystems. “It took the better part of six to seven years to get in place the inspection of blowout preventers and rules about making drilling plans safer and putting commonsense regulations in place, but those have been rescinded,” says Ian MacDonald, a scientist at Florida State University. But 10 years and billions of dollars in cleanup efforts later, many of the same risks that allowed the disaster to occur remain. The spill opened many people’s eyes to the risks of drilling for oil in one of the most ecologically rich, culturally important, and economically valuable parts of the world.

Deepwater horizon