Michael Bromwich, the director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, said on Platts Energy Week that "the landscape has changed."
"In terms of the number of rules and requirements that each applicant must satisfy, as well as the extent of the environmental analysis that we are going to do to make those judgments, we will slow down the pace of permitting," he said.
In an interview with Platts senior writer Gary Gentile, Bromwich added that he said he hoped the permitting process would not slow much, "and I think if we get resources (from Congress) that it may not slow very much at all."
"But now, given the resources, it's inevitable there will be some slowing."
In the interview, Bromwich touched on several issues that indicated he had taken stock of a few practices at the BOEM, the successor agency to the much-criticized Minerals Management Service. BOEM was launched in reaction to the BP Macondo spill and the perception that MMS failed its regulatory role, helping to lead to the disaster.
For example, he said the MMS had an "ethos" that rewarded employees for the sheer number of drilling permits granted. "I don't think it's appropriate for an agency to have numerical goals for granting permits," he said in the interview. "We're not in a race to grant permits. We will grant permits and we hope to grant a lot of permits. But the permit applications have to fully satisfy all the regulatory requirements that exist."
He added that in the past, the agency "didn't always do that."
Asked in the interview about his earlier criticism of the government's heavy use of existing API standards, Bromwich conceded that the BOEM does not have all the expertise that the API does. "In a better-resourced agency, we would have the capability and the confidence to develop our own standards and rules, and I hope we get to that point in the not-too-distant future," he said. "But right now, we're not there, and we can't not do anything, so the alternative is to take industry standards and do our best to incorporate them and modify them in a way that is reasonable."
Other highlights of this week's show include an interview with Energy Information Administration chief Richard Newell on the EIA's Winter Fuels Outlook and a chat with RW Baird senior analyst Christine Tezak on the impact of a canceled new nuclear plant and the future of the so-called nuclear
renaissance in the US.
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