Bsee

The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE), charged with overseeing offshore drilling for the Department of Interior, has no standardized procedures in place for reviewing permits nor a program to streamline the process, according to an internal audit.

An independent government investigation into the Macondo well blowout in April 2010 is warning that offshore drilling remains a dangerous proposition, in part because many operators may be using blowout preventers (BOP) that still have flawed designs.

The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) on Saturday confirmed that the flow of natural gas from a damaged well in Vermilion Block 356 in the Gulf of Mexico was stopped by pumping weighted drilling fluids into the well.

The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) and the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) are responding to a loss of well control event that occurred at 8:30 a.m. CST Thursday at Vermilion Block 356 in the Gulf of Mexico (GOM), about 108 miles southwest of Lafayette, LA.

In a report released Tuesday on the Obama administration’s regulatory priorities for the upcoming year, the Interior Department signaled its plans to get tougher in its oversight of the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) and complete its rulemaking on hydraulic fracturing (fracking) on public lands.

Black Elk Energy and certain of its contractors failed to follow safety rules, resulting in the fatal fire and explosion on the company’s platform in the Gulf of Mexico nearly a year ago, according to an investigative report released by the Interior Department’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) and the United States Coast Guard.

Lone Star NGL LLC has started up the second natural gas liquids (NGL) fractionator at its Mont Belvieu, TX, facility. Lone Star Frac II is a 100,000 b/d fractionator that brings Lone Star’s total fractionation capacity at Mont Belvieu to 200,000 b/d. Lone Star is a joint venture of Energy Transfer Partners LP (ETP) and Regency Energy Partners LP. The fractionators receive NGLs from several sources, including Lone Star’s west Texas NGL pipelines and ETP’s Justice NGL pipeline. Volumes transported on Lone Star’s pipeline system and the ETP Justice pipeline continue to ramp up as shippers under long-term agreements with Lone Star and ETP increase their production from the Permian Basin, Eagle Ford Shale, and other producing regions, the companies said.

The best available and safest technologies (BAST) for offshore oil and natural gas producers may not lie within the walls of the U.S. Department of Interior (DOI) but from independent expertise, according to a report prepared for federal officials.

The Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental and Enforcement (BSEE) has proposed a rule aimed at implementing industry best practices and updating regulations governing production safety systems and equipment used to collect and treat oil and natural gas from offshore production facilities.