Earlier this week, Michael Bromwich, Director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE) lashed out at critics of his agency’s dealings with offshore drilling permits since the BP oil spill last year.
It was during a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and Bromwich was quite put out. “What was destructive, corrosive and not done in good faith was the sniping from certain public officials and industry trade associations,” he said.
“They claimed, and some continue to assert, that we had imposed a ‘de facto’ moratorium or created a ‘permitorium’ that was blocking the issuance of drilling permits,” Bromwich continued. “Not because the applications had failed to meet all the requirements, which was the fact, but supposedly because we had made politically motivated decisions not to issue them. That could not have been further from the truth, but it was repeated often enough that people who should have known better came to believe it.”
In mid-February, the first Gulf of Mexico drilling company declared bankruptcy. And according to the Texas-based Seahawk Drilling’s CEO Randy Stilley, the decision to file for Chapter 11 came after the company’s revenue stream had “been adversely affected by the dramatic slowdown in the issuing of shallow-water permits in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico following the Macondo well blowout.”
At the behest of a bipartisan group of lawmakers and fed-up industry officials, BOEMRE and the Department of Interior issued the first permit for deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico on March 1. Since then, then agency has issued a handful of permits for drilling in the Gulf.
But one industry official isn’t taking Bromwich’s rebuke sitting down. In a statement, Jim Adams, President and CEO of Offshore Marine Service Association, slammed the director, saying “Bromwich should spend less time trying to silence public criticism and more time actually approving drilling permit.”
Adams then asserted that Bromwich should “get his story straight,” noting that Bromwich says permits are not being delayed, but also claims Congress has not provided the sufficient funds the department needs to approve the permits.
“The bureaucratic double-talk would be laughable if thousands of Gulf workers weren’t sitting idle, or if Americans weren’t paying $4 a gallon for gasoline,” said Adams. “There’s a way Bromwich could stop the criticism that seems to bother him so much. He could simply do his job.”