Congressional response to the Exxon-Valdez spill was the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, OPA. This act prohibited any vessel that caused an oil spill of more than 1 million US gallons after March 22, 1989, from operating in Prince William Sound. It also included a double hull design, meaning the bottom and sides of the ship have a double layer of watertight hull surface. One forms the outside of the ship and the second is a few feet inside, providing a second barrier if the outer hull is damaged. This is a step up from double bottom designs, which have two bottoms but only a single layer on the sides of the ship. The Coast Guard estimated that this design could have prevented approximately 60% of the Valdez Spill.*
Exxon appealed this law in 1998, saying that it was specifically aimed at their company. However, since OPA had prevented 18 ships from various companies from entering the sound, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against them. Despite this congressional effort, the Oil Production Act only focused on the Alaska region. No one was paying much attention, at the time, to the Gulf of Mexico. Even in the 1990’s, this area was supplying 90% of U.S. offshore oil, and was the only shoreline other than Alaska open to drilling.**
Simultaneously, President Clinton was meeting with lawmakers about the slump in production. The first Iraq war brought the focus back to domestic production, and also raised fears that demands wouldn’t be met. In June 1994, as Shell was reaching 10,000 barrels a day and more, 75 oil-state lawmakers sat down with President Clinton as he stated he was willing to consider tax incentives for deepwater drilling, as long as it didn’t increase the deficit. In November of 1994, a Republican congress was elected, and the Deepwater Royalty Relief Act was signed just over a year later. The hope was to tap into an estimated 15 billion barrels of oil in the region. With this act, the 12% in royalties paid to the US Treasury was waved for initial production. The deeper the project was, the more relief the company received. When the law was passed in 1995, 326 deepwater leases existed. Just one year later, there were 1,200.
With the rapid changes during these few years, the Mineral Management Service and the Interior Department agency had to keep up. MMS decided that it couldn’t develop new rules while changes were happening so quickly; instead, they decided industry should establish their own “best practices” and regulators would oversee those. One of the changes MMS made is debatable as to whether it was an improvement. In January of 1997, they changed the testing requirements on blowout preventers from weekly to biweekly tests. This would help save companies $25 million annually.
Clinton’s administration saw deepwater production increase five times what it was before the Relief Act, reaching 742,000 barrels a day. Despite this enormous production escalation, production in the US overall was down. This caused an even greater push by the Bush Administration in production from the Gulf. Dick Cheney’s energy task force in 2001 reported that domestically, we were producing 5.8 million barrels a day. This was only 30% of what the country consumed.
George W. Bush passed the Energy Policy Act of 2005, allowing $27 billion towards coal, oil, gas, and nuclear energies; only $6.4 billion was set for renewable energy. This bill also had multiple amendments trying to regulate state and local government power on siting oil refineries, and raise auto fuel efficiency standards, both of which failed.
Three years later, in July 2008, President Bush lifted the presidential ban on offshore drilling first set in place by his father in 1990. At this time, oil was at it’s all-time high. At the September Republican National Convention of that year, “Drill, Baby, Drill” was coined. The very next day Senator John McCain was stating that we had to drill offshore immediately. Standing in their way were congressional bans from 1981. This blocked access to 85% of the offshore oil. Just a mere three weeks later on September 30th, Bush signed an appropriations bill that included lifting the legislative ban. This opened up an area called the Outer Continental Shelf to leases for drilling for the first time in twenty seven years.***
