Melding BOEM and BSEE together again…

DOI Secretary Doug Burgum (center) surrounded by a halo of oil execs.
(Looking out for your best interests, no doubt.)

When Barrack Obama was elected in 2008, and seated in 2009, he appointed Ken Salazar as Secretary of the Department of Interior (DOI). This brought an end to eight years of the DOI being run at the convenience of the extraction industries. With a new sheriff in town, Salazar didn’t waste any time letting us, the public, know that the Department of Interior was back in our hands.

Before the regular five-year review of the offshore leasing plan was issued, Secretary Salazar held large public hearings on all four coasts of America to listen to how citizens wanted the Federal stewardship of our ocean assets to be managed. The citizens in these meetings included commercial fishers, crabbers, and lobstermen; it included recreational users – boaters, sailors, fishers, surfers, and divers. It included the many informed ocean conservation organizations such as OCR. It included California First Nations delegates. It also included representatives from the fossil fuel industry.

I attended in San Francisco, and by-and-large was encouraged by the public’s view of our relationships with the ocean. This was after eight years of our Outer Continental Shelf being treated like a private asset of the industrial extraction industries.

But when the Deepwater Horizon blowout disaster happened on April 20 of 2010, it took Ken Salazar just shy of a month to address the central problem; Minerals Management Service (MMS), headquartered in Denver Colorado, was way too closely associated with the fossil fuel administrative offices in town. MMS became a “one stop shop” for the administration of leases, the regulation of safety and engineering standards, and the payment of extraction royalties to the American people. This was lubricated by cocaine-dusted panty-parties with MMS and Industry, assuring compromised outcomes for us, the taxpayers. (Salazar had been Colorado’s AG, and then Senator before he became Secretary of the Interior, so he likely had a nose for this mess already).

By May 19, 2010 MMS offshore management had been broken up into three agencies; Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) – handling the leasing and management of our offshore assets, Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) – as the name implies, and Office of Natural Resources Revenue (ONRR), responsible for the collection and distribution of royalties and revenues from energy and minerals extraction. The industry/governance party was broken up – much to the grousing of both parties (who committed to return to their old party ways as soon as they could).

So it is no surprise that last week the Administration proposed consolidating the agencies again into the “Ocean Minerals Management” agency to the muffled fanfare of Industry (nothing to see here…).

Just another thing we’ll need to fix once we get our hands back on the tiller again. But now we have a map…

Photo: DOI Secretary Doug Burgum (center) with (left, top to bottom) Chris Wright, President Trump’s Department of Energy nominee, and oil tycoon Harold Hamm, along with (right top to bottom) Bakken shale oil producer Danny Brown, and Todd Slawson, chair of the North Dakota Petroleum Council.