Maley's Energy Blog

Louisiana’s 3rd Congressional District is Southeastern Louisiana: it stretches from St. Bernard Parish and Plaquemines on the east, through the Bayou Country near Houma, to the  sugar cane fields of New Iberia. 

Now, LA-03 is Ground Zero for the BP Oil Spill. We’ve seen the impact of the oil on its fragile coastal marshlands; only time will tell the impact on the fishermen and the workers in the maritime, offshore drilling and oilfield construction industries.

Jeff Landry (R) is a candidate for the seat that is being vacated by Blue Dog Democrat Charlie Melancon.

Jeff’s official website is here: www.landryforlouisiana.com

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I’m no apologist for Big Oil. As a resident of South Louisiana, I’ve seen the mess that was left behind when they left for greener pastures. The simmering animosity between the “majors” and us “independents” goes back generations. They also have enough dough to carry their own water; they don’t need the help of a small fish blogger like me.

That being said, the press has not used the phrase “Rush to Judgment” a single time in the last 60 days.

And apparently Toyota now manufactures nothing but perfectly safe cars. I haven’t seen a Toyota headline in, oh, about 62 days.

The government’s case against BP was summarized in Congress’s letter to Tony Hayward, “inviting” him to testify before the House Subcommittee last Thursday. Bearing in mind that we are looking at what amounts to the plaintiff’s complaint in a lawsuit, I’d prefer not to be on the side defending BP.

The two decisions that BP made that probably contributed most directly to a hazardous situation were: 1) the decision to run a long string of casing, instead of a liner with subsequent tieback; and 2) the decision to proceed with cementing the casing against Halliburton’s recommendation, despite continued returns of gas cut mud and lots of indications of a low expectation of a good cement job.

There were a number of other warning signs and decisions made because “it has worked before; we’ll probably get away with it”. Having guessed wrong on the casing and the cement, when the dominoes started toppling, it was impossible to stop them.

I can’t emphasize enough the degree to which safety culture pervades all the major oil companies, not just BP. On my recent visit to D.C., I remarked about the stark difference in culture. If a major oil company would have been holding that hearing, with +/- 75 people crammed in a relatively small space, the meeting would have started with a safety briefing informing all attendees as to means of egress in the event of a fire, etc. Avenues of exit from that building are poorly marked. Big Oil, I concluded, is much safer than Congress.

In fact, by all reports from people who have worked for all the majors, BP sets the bar for an obsession on safety. Several people have used the term “overkill”: constant training and reminders about safety. Even their safety meetings have safety meetings. My company’s office is in the same building as a BP production office. You will not find a BP employee’s vehicle in the parking lot which has not been backed in to its space. I’ve heard stories about employees of other major companies losing their jobs for casually pulling forward into a parking space at work.

Cross-posted at RedState.com.

Such is the challenge of managing human behavior with safety as a goal. I can believe backing into a parking space is statistically safer than pulling forward, and backing out. But it is all too easy to focus people’s attention on the multitude of individual trees that surround them, while losing sight of the forest. Translating a sincere safety culture into the area that matters most, well design and operations standards, was apparently where BP failed.

Much has been made of the decision to run the long string vs. liner. The WSJ article linked above estimates the saving at $7-10 million, and the fact that some of BP’s peers rarely use long strings in this application. Two drilling engineers for whom I have great respect identified that decision early on as a questionable decision. Each of the majors has a well design style and philosophy. BP’s was within the law and had worked many times before, but left little room for error. Certainly that’s an issue that deserves more study.

If there’s a continuum between “poor judgment” on one end, with “negligence” in the middle and “gross negligence” on the extreme end, I would assume that BP exercised a series of poor judgments that ended up biting them in the backside. One of the Congressmen used the term “groupthink” to describe BP’s probable decison making mode, and I tend to agree. It’s not clear to me that there was ever one individual in the decision process who took accountability for the whole outcome; rather, there were a series of low-level decisions based on “we’ll probably get away with it” thinking, but unfortunately, they were wrong.

It’s still not time for assigning blame. Job #1 is controlling the well. There will be plenty of time to decide who’s to blame, and who will pay. BP, if they’re not completely ground into the dirt by the Obama Administration, has the assets to make restitution. And if, at some point, the Administration loses confidence that BP is up to the task of controlling the well, they should assemble an industry-wide team of the best and the brightest, and get the hell out of their way.

Colleague and occasional RS diarist Steve Maley testified before the House Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources on Thursday. The topic of the hearing was “The Deepwater Horizon Incident: Are the Minerals Management Service Regulations Doing the Job?”

Full video of the hearing (over four hours) is available here. It featured testimony from the acting head of the MMS and the Interior Department’s Inspector General in the morning’s Panel 1. Panel 2 featured BP Atlantis whistleblower Ken Abbott. Steve spoke last in Panel 3, late in the afternoon. Steve’s verbal statement is excerpted here.

A conversation between Steve and your humble correspondent below the fold.

Vladimir: Yo, Steve, wassup, buddy? How was the trip to D.C.?

Steve Maley: Well, Vlad, I felt like the little boy whose mom asked why he kept banging his head against the wall. “It feels so good when I stop!”

V: General comments you’d like to share with RedState readers?

SM: My highlight of the day was when Rep. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) displayed his surgical expertise on the guy from the Pew Environmental Group. I’ve made a few fishing trips to Cocodrie but I’ve never seen a speckled trout filleted as deftly as Rep. Cassidy filleted that [redacted].

V: What else?

SM: Rep. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) impressed me with her questions regarding ethics and the supposed “revolving door” at MMS. Environmental and gov’t watchdog groups have a problem with regulators going to work for industry after they leave gov’t, but none at all with them working for enviro groups. Those enviro groups may be non-profits, but there’s so much dough being thrown around there that it would shame the budgets of most small oil companies.

V: What about Chairman Costa (D-CA)? Was he hostile?

SM: On the contrary, he impressed me as someone who was trying to get to the bottom of what was going on, but not hostile to industry in general. He went out of his way to thank me personally for my testimony. I wish there were 100 more Democrats like him.

V: What about the other Dems?

SM: Mostly only interested in showing the industry in a bad light. Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) was only in the room to take advantage of his 5 minutes to ask questions of Ken Abbott, the BP whistleblower. Rep. Sarbanes (D-MD) just wants to shut offshore drilling down, doesn’t care who he hurts.

V: What’s the deal with this whistleblower?

SM: What a [redacted]. He’s a glorified file clerk who was in charge of some engineering drawings from BP’s Atlantis, another deepwater field. He alleges that BP violated industry practice by not providing certain detailed drawings, when in fact those particular drawings, while arguably good engineering practice, are not an MMS requirement. BP canned him after he became a pain in the [redacted] over it. It turns out he stands to hit the lottery: Federal statute will award him treble damages if he prevails in his wrongful dismissal lawsuit against BP. To get that, he’s willing to damage and shut down the entire deepwater industry. And he’s playing right into the radical Dems hands.

V: But isn’t the lack of those drawings a sign that BP lacked attention to detail.

SM: Well, maybe so, Vlad, but to me, the biggest indication of failure on BP’s part was hiring a [redacted] like him in the first place.

So, Vladimir, how do you think I did?

V: “Don’t quit your day job.”

Cross-posted at RedState.com.

It’s BP, not British Petroleum, ever since Maggie Thatcher privatized the government’s stake in the energy giant back in the 1980s. But the stakes involve a large chunk of the UK’s national wealth, not to mention their national pride.

From Foreign Policy:

Has the BP Bashing Gone Too Far?

There has been extensive coverage in Britain of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. But now it is not the environmental damage that is the big issue; it is the economic damage to BP caused by American politicians, including the president, as they demand that BP pay for the cleanup as well as compensation, and are now demanding the company not pay its shareholders dividends. …

Influential Tory commentators have also joined in with calls for Cameron to defend BP. “I hope David Cameron has the balls to ring Obama today for ‘a full and frank discussion’ — diplomatic language for a blazing row,” writes Iain Dale, a leading Conservative columnist. Tim Montgomerie, a prominent activist who runs the site ConservativeHome, says he hopes that “behind-the-scenes channels are being used” to convey the British government’s displeasure. The Daily Telegraph’s Jeremy Warner ripped Obama for “crass populism which shows very poor statesmanship.”

Cameron is scheduled to speak by phone with Obama over the weekend, and the former British ambassador to Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer, has been on the BBC’s The World At One program arguing it is time for the new prime minister to take up BP’s cause with the U.S. president. “The survival and ultimate prosperity of BP is a vital British interest, and I think the time has come to point it out, at a senior level, to the U.S. administration,” he said. …

But the debate that has erupted in Britain is motivated by more than hurt national pride. The value of BP shares has plummeted 47 percent since April, when the rig exploded, and this is hitting British pocketbooks. Last year, around 14 percent of all dividends in the country’s leading share index, the FTSE 100, were paid by BP, and it is estimated that one pound in every six in pension funds comes from BP. So it’s not just CEO Tony Hayward whose livelihood is being threatened — it’s those of thousands of ordinary Britons, too.

[emphasis added]

Mr. Obama has made no secret of his disdain for the Brits. I’d hate to think that it has clouded his judgment in dealing with this spill.

Cross-posted at RedState.com.

President Obama and Interior Secretary Salazar have done their best to shift the blame of the Deepwater Horizon disaster to the Bush Administration and the supposed ‘cozy relationship’ it fostered between the Minerals Management Service and the oil and gas companies it regulates.

The public consciousness perceives a corrupt and incompetent agency, turning a blind eye to the shenanigans of their industry buddies.

In reality:

• Statistical measures of offshore safety performance improved significantly throughout the Bush years.
• Ditto the drilling well blowout incident rate.
• Bush-era internal investigations led to significant improvement in ethics throughout the organization.
• The Bush Administration increased royalty rates on new leases for the first time in recent memory.

Don’t take my word for it; here are the MMS documents.

Offshore Safety Performance 1996-2008

Offshore Well Blowout Rate 1996-2008

Here’s the source of these two charts.

Ethics Investigations

The Denver Royalty-in-Kind office was a failure of management that did not reflect on either the agency’s regulatory stance or its relationship with the offshore lessees. I blogged about it here, in 2008 when the story broke, and here, just last month. Regardless, this was a Bush-era investigation.

Another Bush-era investigation led to the 2008 convictions of two MMS officials, Jimmy Mayberry and Milton Dial, who colluded to land Mayberry a lucrative consulting arrangement with MMS upon his retirement. Again, this corrupt activity involved revenue collection out of the Denver office, not the offshore regulatory function. The list of Federal agencies which are immune to such insider nest-building is quite short.

A third Bush-era ethics probe is germane to the issue of MMS’s regulatory oversight. An insider tip fingered the head man at the MMS Gulf of Mexico Region in New Orleans.

This investigation was initiated in 2006 based on allegations made by Chris Oynes… . Oynes alleged that Donald C. Howard, Regional Supervisor, GOMR, had attended one or more hunting trips with officials of offshore oil and gas companies. …

On February 3, 2009, Howard was sentenced to one year of probation. He was also ordered to pay a $3,000 fine and a $100 special assessment. In addition, he was ordered to perform 100 hours of community service…

Does the name Chris Oynes, the informant, ring a bell? It should: he’s the guy who was excoriated just a couple of weeks ago when he announced his resignation from MMS. Chris was the associate director of Offshore Energy and Minerals Management who many blamed for the deepwater royalty relief foul-up. The Deepwater Horizon incident was the last straw.

But, but, but…. I thought Oynes and the organization tolerated corruption!?

[Sound effect of heads exploding.]

Actually, the Howard investigation plays a role in the latest MMS ethics scandal to hit the wires, involving several inspectors in the Lake Charles, LA district office.

The investigation follows a report citing workers from the MMS accepting gifts, viewing pornography and possibly allowing oil workers to fill out their own inspection reports.

The report found it was commonplace before 2007 for MMS employees at a Lake Charles, Louisiana office to receive gifts including sporting event tickets and hunting trips from energy companies, Reuters reported.[emphasis added]

Before 2007? Maybe the Inspector General’s Report, rushed to press to bolster the Administration’s case against the MMS, will shed some light on the significance of that timing:

…[A]cceptance of gifts from oil and gas companies were widespread throughout that office, but appeared to have declined after the investigation and termination of Don Howard in January 2007 for his acceptance of a gift from one of these companies.

…[W]hen MMS supervisor Don Howard, of the New Orleans office, was investigated and later terminated in January 2007 for his gift acceptance, this behavior appears to have drastically declined.

You can read the report and decide just how egregious the ethical lapses were, but the fact remains that a Bush-era investigation ended the improper acceptance of meals, gifts, and invitations to sporting events. And what is the outcome of the case under President Obama, after all this huffing and puffing?

On October 15, 2009, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Louisiana declined this case for prosecution. This case is being referred to the Director of the Minerals Management Service for any action deemed appropriate.

I’ve heard that one inspector is on administrative leave.

During the Bush era, offshore safety and well control statistics markedly improved. That’s either a sign of regulatory success or of an industry that’s serious about making improvement. Ethics investigations rooted out corruption in the management ranks, and the lower echelons of the organization quickly got the message that their (mostly) petty gifts and gratuities would no longer be tolerated.

You are reading this here, and not in the mainstream media, because it is much easier for “professional journalist” to be force-fed the Administration’s narrative than to do a little basic fact-checking.

Cross-posted at RedState.com.

Confusion was the order of the day. On Wednesday, the first new shallow-water well drilling permit was issued, to the consternation of the environmental community:

“I’m outraged,” said Kieran Suckling, executive director for the Tucson, Ariz.-based Center for Biological Diversity. “How is it that shallow water drilling suddenly became safe again?”

Never mind that shallow water drilling has no demonstrated problems. Since the Deepwater Horizon, anything offshore feels unsafe…

Thursday morning, the MMS Regional Office in New Orleans announced a total ban on all new drilling permits. Thursday afternoon, that ban was contradicted by MMS Headquarters in Washington (story here).

On Wednesday, Governor Bobby Jindal sent a letter to President Obama detailing the expected impact of the deepwater drilling moratorium on Louisiana’s economy.

The Louisiana MidContinent Oil and Gas Association (LMOGA, the trade association of the state’s largest producers) provided more detail on the projected loss of economic activity:

Each drilling rig averages 90 to 140 employees at any one time (2 shifts per day), and 180 to 280 for 2 2-week shifts. Each job supports 4 other positions.

Therefore, 800 to 1400 jobs per idle rig are at risk. Wages for those jobs average $1,804/weekly; potential for lost wages is huge, over $5 to $10 million for 1 month – per platform. Wages lost could be over $165 to $330 million/month for all 33 platforms.

The rationale behind the deepwater moratorium is confusing. It encompasses drilling in water depths greater than 500 feet, although that depth has never been considered the line between “deep” and “shallow” before.

Most, but not all, of the wells in water over 500 feet deep employ subsea blowout preventers, similar in concept to the one that failed on the Deepwater Horizon. “Subsea” means the wellhead rests on the seafloor, as opposed to a “dry” or conventional wellhead on a platform, commonly used on virtually all shallow water wells.

Nonsensically, the moratorium applies to platform wells, if the platform happens to be in water deeper than 500 feet. With the wellhead high and dry, not on the seabed, the water depth makes little difference.

With deepwater rig rates running in the neighborhood of $500,000 per day, permit termination is a considerable concern to both the operator and for the rig owner, the drilling contractor. Some drilling contracts reportedly have Force Majeure provisions that keep the operator on the hook for a substantial amount of the day rate if government action prevents performance; other contracts may allow the operator to slide. To my knowledge, this is the first time that Force Majeure has come into play due to regulatory action.

In either case, operators will be trying to keep the rigs in the Gulf by any means possible. Brazil* could reportedly put many of the rigs to work in a very short time. Once they leave, the rigs will be very difficult to return to the U.S. market.

*Yes, that’s Brazil, as in Petrobras, which is partly owned by the Brazilian government, and partly by the public (notably George Soros). Petrobras, the same company that has been promised $10 billion in loans by President Obama in support of its deepwater oil drilling program.

Cross-posted at RedState.com.

In his two most recent appointments to his presidential commission on the BP oil spill, President Obama reveals that he’s got waaaay bigger fish to fry than finding out what went wrong on the Deepwater Horizon, and fixing it.

Obama’s Oil Panel May Tackle Energy, Environment

The new presidential commission investigating the Gulf oil spill will include two experts who have been active on the subject of global warming, including one who wrote just last month that the country should redouble efforts to lessen its dependence on oil, The Associated Press has learned.

The two will join former Florida Sen. Bob Graham and former Environmental Protection Agency chief William Reilly [also Chairman Emeritus of the World Wildlife Fund – ed.], whose roles as co-chairmen of the seven-member panel were previously announced.

Together, the backgrounds of the four panel members selected so far suggest the commission will look at more than just what went wrong, including the bigger picture of the country’s conflicting environmental and energy needs.

According to the AP, the commission’s new members will be Donald Boesch, president of the Center for Environmental Science at the University of Maryland, and former Alaska Lt. Gov. Fran Ulmer, currently University of Alaska Anchorage chancellor.

Hold onto your wallets. Here comes $8.00/gallon gasoline.

President Obama’s stated his reason for forming the commission last Wednesday in Pittsburgh: “…so that the American people will have answers on exactly what happened.” That’s a goal that we can all heartily commend. But then he added a whopper that tips his hand: “We have to acknowledge that there are inherent risks to drilling four miles beneath the surface of the Earth, and these are risks that are bound to increase the harder oil extraction becomes. We also have to acknowledge that an America run solely on fossil fuels should not be the vision we have for our children and our grandchildren.”

The problem with controlling the Deepwater Horizon well has little or nothing to do with the fact that it’s 3-1/2 miles deep. It has everything to do with the fact that it’s in water a mile deep. With one facile sentence, the President has conflated deepwater oil drilling with all exploration for oil and gas.

Shallow water offshore wells are vastly different from BP’s operation. Divers can dive to all depths. Wellhead and blowout prevention equipment is at the surface. Relief wells (in the rare occasion that they’re needed) can be drilled in a matter of a couple of weeks, not three months.

Most significantly, gas predominates in the shallow water Gulf. Thirty percent of our oil production comes from the Gulf, but 80% of that is from deepwater.

The President has signaled his intention to use this crisis as an opportunity to put Cap and Trade legislation back on the table. Also in the crosshairs are certain oil industry-specific tax provisions that have long been on the Administration’s hit list. This is possible because in crisis mode there is little critical thinking.

“Bad BP” = “Bad Big Oil” = “Bad Oil”

The problem with that line of thinking, and the knee-jerk reaction to it, is that it ends up hurting domestic independents (who drill mostly gas wells) and sparing BP and the other multinationals, who lost these tax credits to the wrath of prior Congresses and Presidents.

To the extent that the multinationals are hurt, they can shift their operations to foreign countries, and all the oil we consume will be imported in tankers. Oil spill, anyone?

Cross-posted at RedState.com.

Amidst the puffing, pontificating and finger-pointing in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, two large questions loom:

1. Who will the Feds hold accountable?
2. How can our government assure us that a big oil spill will never happen again?

Quick answers, with a caveat (I’m an engineer, not a lawyer):

1. BP, as operator.
2. They can’t, and we should not expect them to.

For background on these questions, let’s review the roles of the various companies involved, using the Deepwater Horizon as an example. As with many offshore leases, this one is jointly owned by a consortium of lease owners, or lessees, who competitively bid for the rights to explore and develop a 5,000 acre patch of the offshore. In this case, the lessees are BP, Anadarko Petroleum and Mitsui, who own 65%, 25% and 10% of the venture, respectively (IIRC). The consortium selected BP to act as operator, tasked with taking the lead with permitting, planning and executing the venture.

BP as operator contracted with numerous oil service companies who provide specialized expertise in the myriad of technical services, equipment and logistics required for the challenging goal of putting an 18,000 foot deep hole in 5,000 feet of water on their leased tract. The lead service company in this case was Transocean, the rig contractor (owner of the rig, also called a MODU, for Mobile Offshore Drilling Unit; we’ll see shortly why this is an important distinction). Other service companies include Halliburton (cement), Schlumberger (logging), MI-Swaco (mud services), plus boat companies, surveying companies, catering companies, and so on. Each has a specialized job.

BP and its partners pay for the well. BP has the responsibility to design the well, secure permits, and direct activities with respect to the well. On the rig, the operator’s instructions are conveyed by the “Company Man”, to the “Toolpusher”, the lead rig man. The toolpusher is designated OIM (Offshore Installation Manager) and as such is effectively captain of the vessel.

The Company Man may be the “hooking bull”, but the OIM holds a trump card: the safety of the vessel and crew are his responsibility.

Note that of all these parties, the only ones that have a contractual relationship with the Federal government are the lessees, with the designated operator calling the shots.

As we touched on in the comments of a thread the other day, operations on the outer continental shelf are actually in international waters. By international treaty, each country has an “Exclusive Economic Zone” which extends halfway to adjacent countries, or 200 miles, whichever is closer.

A 1953 law, the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, governs the Federal claim on minerals withing the Exclusive Economic Zone, and is part of the empowering legislation for Federal regulation of offshore oil and gas activity. The OCSLA reads in part:

[43 U.S.C. 1332]
SEC. 4. LAWS APPLICABLE TO OUTER CONTINENTAL SHELF.—

(a)(1) The Constitution and laws and civil and political jurisdiction of the United States are hereby extended to the subsoil and seabed of the outer Continental Shelf and to all artificial islands, and all installations and other devices permanently or temporarily attached to the seabed which may be erected thereon for the purpose of exploring for, developing, or producing resources therefrom, or any such installation or other device (other than a ship or vessel) for the purpose of transporting such resources, to the same extent as if the outer Continental shelf were an area of exclusive Federal jurisdiction located within a state: Provided, however, That mineral leases on the outer Continental Shelf shall be maintained or issued only under the provisions of this Act. [emphasis added]

It’s that “other than a ship or vessel” part that’s of interest. The Deepwater Horizon was a seagoing vessel, flagged in the Marshall Islands. Transocean, the world’s largest offshore drilling company, recently moved its corporate headquarters to Switzerland. (Coast Guard regulations apply as to any vessel within the Economic Zone.)

MMS exerts regulatory authority only on the lease owner and operator, and not on the rig contractor.  When the MMS inspects a rig and a deficiency is found, it is the operator, not the rig owner, who must answer the INC (Incident of Non-Compliance) from the MMS. It holds the operator responsible for BOP maintenance and testing, for housekeeping, and for personnel training and certification. This creates an imbalance, as the operator often has only one or two representatives on the rig; the operator has hired the contractor not only for the use of his equipment (as in the BOP), but also for its maintenance and expertise in the execution of drilling activities. Operators are not rig owners and are not in a position to dictate many details of rig operation, any more than they can tell a hired truck driver how to shift gears.

The same is true of other service companies who work offshore. They are not licensed by the MMS. MMS holds operators accountable for using safe, trained and certified third parties. Operators with worse than average compliance histories must meet with the MMS on an annual basis. Operators can and have lost their right to operate offshore based on a poor compliance history.

We’ve also discussed well design, and whether BP “cut corners” or otherwise contributed to the blowout with a poorly designed well plan. Design criteria for construction of wells, platforms, pipelines, and just about anything else imaginable in oil and gas are published by the American Petroleum Institute (API) as “Recommended Practices”.

The API’s Recommended Practices are developed by volunteer committees of industry engineers and scientists who are specialists within their respective fields. So to that extent, as shocking as it may be to some outsiders, industry does set its own standards.

MMS can also impose design criteria. For example, the design parameters for fixed platforms has changed recently to make hurricane survivability more likely. Well design is submitted to MMS, and checked for sufficiency by their staff engineers. It’s a lot more common for an MMS engineer to assert control over how a well is plugged, at the end of its life, than to become involved in the initial design.

Just the catalog of API standards is a 2+MB document. Standards are continually being updated to keep pace with technology and practices. It is not feasible for government to assume the role of maintaining a set of prescriptive standards to take the place of the API Recommended Practices, which would require a staff of engineers, scientists and technologists who could anticipate industry needs and write regulation ahead of the application.

Besides, for the government to set design standards would mean that they would also be accountable for the results. That will never happen.

Despite all the conspiracy theories, baseless accusations and projections of evil intent, energy companies have yet to figure out how to make money from blowouts, rig accidents and oil spills. Oil companies make money by keeping product in the pipe, and by keeping their lawyers out of the courtroom.

The only way to make this, or any heavy industry, 100% safe is not to engage in it. Judging from the way the President and his Administration are playing out their hand, that seems to be their intent.

Cross-posted at RedState.com.

Rookies make rookie mistakes. With all due respect.

For the last fifteen years, I’ve been the operations manager for a small Gulf of Mexico oil and gas company. I’ve had more than a few sleepless nights in that time, whether it be worrying about a problem well, a reported accident or an impending hurricane. Since Barack Obama has assumed full accountability for the outcome of the ongoing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, I offer this advice as one who understands the nature, if not the scope, of the challenge facing him.

Mr. President, it’s really pretty simple:

1. You must have the best and the brightest technical people working the problem.
2. You must make sure that they are motivated to fulfill your goals.
3. Above all, you must trust them to do a good job.

Engineers are smart and proud people and don’t like to be told how to do their jobs. It’s best if they recommend a solution; 99% of the time I accept their recommendation. The last thing I want to do is to send someone to do a job with a tool that he/she doesn’t believe in. Experience has taught me that the human urge to say “I told you so, boss” often overcomes the urge to succeed, especially if succeeding means telling the boss that he was right all along.

As for point #1, BP already has the best and the brightest working on controlling the source of the spill. They are working as hard as they can to fix the problem. Your mistake, sir, is that you are constitutionally unable to let go of the Lefty prejudice: Oil People Are Bad People. So you’ve a given us all this nonsense about “boots on the throat” and threatened prosecutions and pointing fingers at the finger-pointers, which has done nothing to enhance their confidence in you as a leader. Oh, they want badly to stop the spill, but their loyalty to you and your success is only as deep as the loyalty you’ve shown them.

And then, if you had a back up plan, it would be in knowledgeable Federal employees to take over. Your only source of oilfield-savvy professionals who might be capable of managing this task is in the MMS, and you’ve already thrown them under the bus! You’ve taken a couple of unrelated scandals (investigated, by the way, on President Bush’s watch), and a couple of wayward employees in a backwater office to build the oft-repeated notion of a ‘cozy, often corrupt relationship’ between MMS and the industry it regulates.

How many careers and reputations of good, dedicated public employees have you tarnished in the process? That’s the scandal.

By taking this tack, and deciding to forge ahead with reorganizing this agency before this crisis has been resolved, morale at MMS is at an all-time low. A good many of these folks probably voted for you, too.

A thought to consider: how many Federal agencies are free of the supposed “sins” that your auditors found at MMS? Does a ‘cozy relationship’ exist between, say, the Department of Labor and the SEIU? Has a Defense Department contract analyst ever written contract specs that only they could satisfy, post-retirement? We know that SEC staff surfed porn. The Congress? “Let he who is without sin…”, etc.

Or maybe the MMS/industry relationship reflected a mutual respect for the job each had to do. Just maybe.

Mr. President, I really want you to succeed, at least insofar as allaying Malia’s concern about “the hole”. But it looks like you’ve written off nearly every American (and Brit) who understands oilfield technology. Your Big-Hat-No-Cows Interior Secretary and your Nobel-Prize-Laureate Energy Secretary aren’t going to be much help to you now.

Face it: you need those Big Bad Oil People on your side, pulling for this thing to be fixed ASAP. Instead of rooting for you to fail.

Cross-posted at RedState.com.

President Obama, quick to criticize George W. Bush for his appointment of a lightly-qualified Michael Brown as FEMA director, apparently learned little from his predecessor’s mistake.

In today’s press conference, President Obama claimed to know nothing of MMS Director Liz Birnbaum’s sudden departure. Whatever. Let’s consider Liz’s qualifications to be the head of the agency charged with regulating rigs like the Deepwater Horizon and 30% of domestic oil production.

Brown/Harvard Law? Check. Environmental lawyer? Check. Environmental policy wonk? Check. Experienced with oil and gas technology?

<*chirp*> … <*chirp*> …

Liz’s bio (below the fold) is chock-full of counseling, coordinating, legislating and advocating, but very little doing. I posit that Ms. Birnbaum would not know an oil well if she fell into one.

Under Obama and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, the Minerals Management Service became an instrument by which the Administration advances its Green Energy/Green Jobs vision. The MMS Cape Wind and other renewable projects were the way to really get noticed within the agency. Oil and gas were so … so, over.

Other MMS top management resumes can be found here. Note that the emphasis is heavy on environmental activism, light on oil and gas experience.

Ex-industry hands tend to develop ‘cozy relationships’, don’t you know?

MMS Director S. Elizabeth Birnbaum Biography

S. Elizabeth (Liz) Birnbaum assumed duties as Director of the Minerals Management Service (MMS) on July 15, 2009.

As MMS Director, Birnbaum administers programs that ensure the effective management of renewable energy, such as wind, wave, and ocean current energy; and traditional energy and mineral resources on the nation’s Outer Continental Shelf, including the environmentally safe exploration, development, and production of oil and natural gas, as well as the collection and distribution of revenues for minerals developed on federal and American Indian lands.

Before her appointment, she was staff director for the Committee on House Administration, where she oversaw strategy development, budget management and staff activities for the committee that manages legislative branch agencies. From 2001-2007,  she was Vice President for Government Affairs and General Counsel for American Rivers, where she directed advocacy programs for the nation’s leading river conservation organization.

At the Department of the Interior, Birnbaum was Associate Solicitor for Mineral Resources from 2000 to 2001, supervising and managing a staff of attorneys that provided legal advice, developed regulations and conducted litigation on minerals issues for the Minerals Management Service, Bureau of Land Management, and Office of Surface Mining and Reclamation.

In addition, she was a special assistant to the Interior Solicitor, from 1999 to 2000, overseeing legal policy on a range of natural resource issues, including mining law, public land management and hydropower licensing. From 1991 to 1999 she was counsel to the House Committee on Natural Resources, where she handled legislative and oversight activities for the Department of the Interior, U.S. Forest Service, and electric power marketing administrations. From 1987 to 1991 she was counsel for the Water Resources Program of the National Wildlife Federation.

Birnbaum has been an officer and member of numerous boards and commissions, including the National Capital Section of the American Water Resources Association; Arlington County Environment and Energy Conservation Commission; and the Environment, Energy and Natural Resources Section of the District of Columbia Bar.

Birnbaum received her Juris Doctor from Harvard University in 1984 and her A.B. degree, magna cum laude, from Brown University in 1979. She was Editor in Chief of the Harvard Environmental Law Review, Vol. 8.

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Cross-posted at RedState.com.