A federal judge in New Orleans today overturned President Barack Obama’s six-month moratorium on any new deep-water drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico. The ban on new drilling had been imposed after an April 20 explosion on Transocean’s Deepwater Horizon rig — which was run by BP — set off the country’s worst oil spill in history.
Since then, the Interior Department has stopped approving any new drilling permits and suspended drilling at 33 wells already exploring for oil in the gulf. The government has said it needs time to do a thorough safety evaluation to ensure that disasters like BP’s blast don’t happen again. But Hornbeck Offshore Services, an oil services company based in Louisiana, filed a lawsuit challenging the moratorium. It argues that there’s no evidence that continued drilling poses any threat of future oil spills, and that halting such operations could cost Louisiana thousands of jobs and millions of dollars in lost wages. The lawsuit is backed by oil companies, Louisiana’s governor and other state officials.
U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman heard testimony from both sides in a two-hour hearing on Monday. He ruled that the Interior Department failed to give adequate reasoning for the moratorium, according to the AP, saying the department assumes that because one rig failed, all companies and rigs doing deep-water drilling are an imminent danger.
“The safeguards and regulations in place on April 20 did not create a sufficient margin of safety,” Justice Department stated at the hearing Monday.
Asked by Feldman why the U.S. government didn’t implement a similar moratorium after the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, the Government called the Deepwater Horizon blowout a “game changer.”
Richard J. Arsenault, 2011
