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Court says OCS safety rules not legal
A federal judge in the Louisiana District Court has upheld a complaint by Gulf of Mexico oil service company Ensco Offshore Co. against the Department of the Interior’s imposition in June of new safety rules for drilling in the outer continental shelf.
Interior issued the safety rules in a notice to lessees, designated NTL-05.
In a court order issued on Oct. 19, Judge Martin Feldman said that the new safety rules appeared to be substantive in nature and that Interior had contravened the Administrative Procedure Act by not giving public notice of the rules and then giving the public an opportunity to comment on them.
“Notice and comments were required by law,” Feldman said. “The government did not comply, and the NTL-05 is of no lawful force or effect.”
However, the judge’s ruling is something of an academic issue at this point since on Sept. 30, under an emergency rule-making procedure, Interior issued a new drilling safety rule that contains most of the provisions of NTL-05. And, in announcing the new rule, Michael Bromwich, the director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, said that BOEM would move forward with a standard rulemaking process that includes greater opportunity for public comment and that considers implementing additional recommendations from a drilling safety report that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar delivered to President Obama in May.
Filed in July Ensco Offshore filed its lawsuit in July in response both to the issue of NTL-05 and to the second of two OCS deepwater drilling moratoriums that Interior had imposed in response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. In addition to its allegations over NTL-05, Ensco claimed that the two drilling moratoriums were also illegal, as were delays in issuing new OCS drilling permits and a new DOI requirement for certain documents associated with oil development and production activities in some parts of the Gulf of Mexico.
In August the company asked the court for a ruling on just the legality of the second drilling moratorium and the NTL-05 notice to lessees. The District Court judge has now made that ruling, upholding the complaint against NTL-05 but saying that the claim regarding the second moratorium will be addressed in a separate ruling.
—Alan Bailey
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