Driller Control Room on Ocean Black Rhino Drillship GOM. In the last ten years, Interior has been making oil production on the Outer Continental Shelf safer. Efforts to prevent another catastrophe like Deepwater Horizon are at the core of the missions of Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement.
The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement has been the lead federal agency charged with improving safety and ensuring environmental protection related to the offshore energy industry - primarily oil and natural gas - on the Outer Continental Shelf. BSEE vigorously regulates oversight of worker safety, emergency preparedness, environmental compliance and conservation of resources. The bureau’s work includes conducting thousands of announced and unannounced inspections, developing safer technologies, mandating that each operator establish and follow their Safety and Environmental Management System, and carrying out investigations when serious incidents do occur.
BSEE engineers on the job. Photo by the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement. Original public domain image from Flickr
