The Minerals Management Service (MMS), of the Department of the Interior, and the U.S. Coast Guard will hold a joint workshop in Houston on Friday, April 12, to discuss the Coast Guard’s transfer of the responsibility of inspecting and enforcing its regulations for fixed facilities on the Outer Continental Shelf to MMS.

The Coast Guard published a final rule in the Federal Register in February making the transfer official. Because MMS has since received a number of queries from the offshore oil and gas industry, it decided to hold the workshop jointly with the Coast Guard to answer questions on how the transfer will be implemented.

The meeting agenda calls for presentation of how that rulemaking came about, overviews of the MMS and Coast Guard inspection programs, and a presentation of how the integrated inspection program will work. A question-and-answer session will follow.

The workshop will take place at the Sheraton North Houston Hotel Amphitheater at George Bush International Airport, 15700 John F. Kennedy Blvd., Houston, Texas. The phone number is (281) 442-5100. The Coast Guard’s final rulemaking appeared in the Federal Register on February 7, 2002, beginning on page 5912.

MMS is the federal agency in the U.S. Department of the Interior that manages the nation's oil, natural gas and other mineral resources on the outer continental shelf in federal offshore waters. The agency also collects, accounts for and disburses mineral revenues from federal and Indian leases. These revenues totaled nearly $10 billion in 2001 and more than $120 billion since the agency was created in 1982. Annually, nearly $1 billion from those revenues go into the Land and Water Conservation Fund for the acquisition and development of state and federal park and recreation lands.

Return to News Releases