Feds and energy firms fight, rigs are idle and hundreds of jobs are lost

Offshore drilling regulators and energy companies are at loggerheads over a requirement that the firms plan for nightmare scenarios about possible oil spills, with the standoff slowing permits for new shallow-water wells. Now that the Obama administration has lifted its moratorium on deep-water drilling, the dispute threatens to hold up some of those projects, too. At issue is the government's mandate that companies seeking to drill offshore must describe the "worst case discharge" of oil and gas from their proposed wells. That single calculation dictates a cascade of other requirements - including how much insurance companies must carry and the amount of response equipment they must reserve to clean up such a spill. But offshore operators and government regulators have been at odds over how to arrive at the numbers - which are, at best, subjective predictions based on a broad assortment of factors, from how much of a geological formation might be exposed to the number of oil and gas zones at a proposed well...more