What did the oil spill commission report leave out?

Brett Michael Dykes

Last week's 377-page final report by the National Oil Spill Commission was long on assigning blame for the BP oil disaster and included a laundry list of recommendations to prevent future incidents.

But the Houston Chronicle's Loren Steffy believes that the commission left out the one recommendation he feels is the most crucial in regards to preventing future spills in the Gulf.

He writes:

Its most pervasive warning is that the Deepwater Horizon accident could happen again, yet it ignores the most likely source: companies that have already shown they have trouble operating safely.

While it talks about changes in rules governing offshore drilling, it focuses on "self-policing mechanisms" by the industry and stronger government enforcement. It never suggests that companies' ability to get new permits should be based, at least in part, on their operating history.

In other words, companies with poor safety records shouldn't have the same access to drilling permits as companies with good ones. If you despoil a major natural resource like the Gulf, you may not get a chance to do it again, at least not for a while.

Steffy notes that when a similar idea was floated on Capitol Hill this past summer, BP -- by far the oil and gas industry's most egregious safety offender -- threatened to renege on its promise to place $20 billion in an escrow fund to compensate victims of the spill, claiming that such a policy would be devastating to the company's bottom line, and the proposal drifted off into the sunset. Additionally, BP is one of the biggest players in the Gulf oil exploration market, so inhibiting their ambitions would likely have have significant economic ramifications (loss of jobs, tax revenue, etc) for the region.

Did concerns for the Gulf region's economy prevent the commission from offering this tougher, but seemingly reasonable recommendation? The Lookout reached out to the commission but, possibly due to the federal holiday, didn't hear back. We'll let you know when we do.