The Trump administration on Thursday proposed to loosen Obama-era safety regulations for the oil industry in the Arctic Ocean off Alaska to ease the way for petroleum extraction in the region, an effort that President-elect Joe Biden will likely throw out once in office.
The proposal would revise a suite of Obama-era rules crafted to improve safety in the extreme conditions of the Arctic after a Shell drilling rig ran aground in the Gulf of Alaska in 2012. The company later abandoned oil exploration in the Arctic, and there are no active drilling operations there.
Now, much of the US portion of the Arctic Ocean—the Chukchi Sea and part of the Beaufort Sea—is off-limits to new oil and gas leasing under a 2019 judge’s order that overturned President Donald Trump’s effort to open vast areas of the Arctic and Atlantic oceans to oil leasing. Biden has also vowed to ban all new drilling in federal lands and waters once he takes office.
The US Department of Interior, which oversees the government’s offshore oil and gas program, said in a statement that the revisions would “remove unnecessary, burdensome provisions” in the 2016 rules.
It would specifically eliminate a requirement that oil operators submit a detailed operations plan before filing an exploration request, according to a fact sheet published by the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement.
The administration would also roll back a rule requiring operators to demonstrate they can quickly deploy containment equipment in case of spills, such as capping stacks or domes.