The Reorganization of the Former MMS
On May 19, 2010,
Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar
signed a
Secretarial Order dividing the Minerals Management
Service (MMS) into three independent entities to better carry
out its three missions of 1) ensuring the balanced and
responsible development of energy resources on the Outer
Continental Shelf (OCS); 2) ensuring safe and environmentally
responsible exploration and production and enforcing applicable
rules and regulations;
and 3)
ensuring a fair return to the taxpayer from offshore royalty and
revenue collection and disbursement activities.
MMS was renamed
Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE)
to more accurately describe the scope of the organization’s
oversight. Michael
R. Bromwich, was chosen to lead
BOEMRE in June 2010 to reform the government’s
regulation of offshore energy development and the agency
responsible for it.
An
implementation plan published by the Department
of the Interior in July 2010 called for restructuring the
department’s offshore energy management responsibilities,
detailing a transition that would begin as early as October 1
and be completed in 2011.
In the place of
the former MMS – and to replace BOEMRE – we are creating three
strong, independent agencies with clearly defined roles and
missions. MMS – with its conflicting missions of promoting
resource development, enforcing safety regulations, and
maximizing revenues from offshore operations and lack of
resources – could not keep pace with the challenges of
overseeing industry operating in U.S. waters.
The
reorganization of the former MMS is designed to remove those
conflicts by clarifying and separating missions across three
agencies and providing each of the new agencies with clear
missions and additional resources necessary to fulfill those
missions. We are designing and implementing these organizational
changes while we fully take into account the crucial need for
information-sharing and the other connections among the
functions of the former MMS. This is essential to ensure that
the regulatory processes related to offshore leasing, plan
approval, and permitting are not adversely affected.
Implementation
On
October 1, 2010, the bureau completed the transfer of the
revenue collection function. The
Office of Natural Resources Revenue now resides under
the jurisdiction of DOI’s Office of Policy, Management and
Budget. The final stage of the reorganization of BOEMRE will
become effective October 1, 2011 when its splits into two
independent entities: the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM)
and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE).
The new
Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) will be
responsible for managing development of the nation’s offshore
resources in an environmentally and economically responsible
way. Functions will include: Leasing, Plan Administration,
Environmental Studies, National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)
Analysis, Resource Evaluation, Economic Analysis and the
Renewable Energy Program.
The new
Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE)
will enforce
safety and environmental regulations. Functions will include:
All field operations including Permitting and Research,
Inspections, Offshore Regulatory Programs, Oil Spill Response,
and newly formed Training and Environmental Compliance
functions.
Specifically, the separation of BOEM and BSEE:
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Separates resource management from safety oversight
to allow permitting engineers and inspectors greater
independence, more budgetary autonomy and clearer senior
leadership focus. The goal is to create a tough-minded
but fair regulator that can effectively evaluate and
keep pace with the risks and challenges of offshore
drilling and will promote the development of safety
cultures in offshore operators.
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Provides a structure that ensures that robust
environmental analyses are conducted and that the
potential environmental effects of proposed
operations are given appropriate weight during
decision-making related to resource management in BOEM
and ensures that leasing and plan approval
activities are properly balanced. These processes must
be both rigorous and efficient so that operations can go
forward in a timely manner with a complete understanding
of their potential environmental impacts and appropriate
mitigation of those potential environmental effects are
in place.
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Strengthens the role of environmental review and
analysis in both organizations
through various structural and organizational
mechanisms. Those include:
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The creation of a first-ever Chief Environmental
Officer in BOEM; |
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Separating Environmental reviews from Leasing in the
regions in BOEM; |
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The development of a new Environmental Compliance
and enforcement function in BSEE; and
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More prominent Oil Spill Response Plan review and
enforcement in BSEE. |
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For a Fact
Sheet on the BOEM-BSEE separation please
click here.
Continued Process Improvements
Multiple
reviews and investigations, including by the
National
Commission
on the BP
Deepwater Horizon
Oil Spill and Offshore
Drilling, the Department of the Interior’s
Inspector General, the Department’s Safety Oversight Board, and
multiple Committees of the House and Senate, have highlighted
the need for reform in the way the agency does business and in
the way oil and gas operations are carried out on the OCS. In
response, BOEMRE created a number of
implementation teams, which have been hard at work
for several months analyzing critical aspects of BOEMRE’s
structures, functions and processes, and implementing needed
changes.
New Recruitment
Director
Bromwich launched a
recruitment campaign to expand the bureau’s field of
inspectors and engineers – receiving more than 500 applications
in two weeks. BOEMRE recently
announced that the bureau will begin to use
multiple-person inspection teams for offshore oil and gas
inspections. This internal process improvement will improve
oversight and help ensure that offshore operations proceed
safely and responsibly. The new process will allow teams to
inspect multiple operations simultaneously and thoroughly, and
enhance the quality of inspections on larger facilities.
Director
Bromwich also embarked on an
April 2011 recruitment campaign to expand the number of
environmental scientists in the agency, with visits to more than
10 top universities across the country.
BOEMRE will be hiring environmental scientists in the coming
months to do work in fields that include environmental studies,
National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)
review, and environmental compliance – all of which are critical
to the balanced development of offshore resources. The bureau
received more than 2,000 applications during and since the six
week tour.
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