Government tries to clarify offshore drilling rules

The federal government on Monday issued a five-page memo meant to clarify rules for offshore drilling, in response to oil and gas industry complaints that new mandates imposed since last year's Gulf spill are muddled. The federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement also said it would reopen a public comment period to help guide the agency's possible rewrite of a drilling safety rule put in place last October. The document covers several areas but focuses on a major source of industry complaints: confusion about the wording of the October offshore drilling safety rule. That measure adopted two sets of recommended practices for emergency equipment and well design that had been developed by the American Petroleum Institute. The problem was that instead of rewriting those mandates in their own words, government regulators simply referenced API documents and specified that any time the API recommended practices said "should" it now meant "must" under the interim drilling safety rule. Industry representatives complained that the changes affected more than 14,000 discretionary provisions in 80 different standards, and in some cases, those new requirements were conflicting....more