Wanted: A tough drilling regulator
It’s been a little harder than expected for the Interior Department to find a permanent head of its new offshore drilling safety agency.
“There have been a lot of efforts for quite a while to find a new director,” Michael Bromwich, director of the departments Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, said Tuesday at an event hosted by Platts Energy Podium. “But it’s been harder and it’s taken longer … than we anticipated.”Continue Reading
Bromwich — who has agreed to stay on as temporary head of the new Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement until a permanent replacement is in place — said the challenge includes finding someone who can handle the spotlight and scrutiny on Capitol Hill.
“He or she will find themselves in the middle of very important and controversial issues,” Bromwich said.
Along with the need to find a candidate with the right technical skills and background without appearing to be a “yes person” to the demands of industry, the new director also needs to be able to “stand up to the political heat,” he added.
While there have been a couple of promising candidates, they backed out “precisely because they didn’t want to be in the crucible of politics,” Bromwich said.
One BOEMRE official added that one of the candidates backed out after Bromwich’s appearance last Thursday at a House Natural Resources Committee hearing.
The hearing did not seem unusually combative for Bromwich — who has faced significant heat from Republicans and oil-state Democrats over the pace of drilling permits since last year’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
Bromwich — as the nation’s leading offshore drilling enforcer — has largely been the Obama administration’s point man on reorganizing the former Minerals Management Service into three distinct agencies, issuing ramped up post-spill safety and environmental operations and defending the pace of issuing permits.
The protracted search has also stalled Bromwich’s post-agency career. “It is no secret in Interior that my original plan was to leave once the reorganization was complete as of Oct. 1,” he said.
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