U.S. oil oversight official quits
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The head of U.S. Minerals Management Service (MMS)'s oil and gas drilling program announced Monday he is retiring at the end of the month, a move follows the April 20 explosion aboard the offshore oil rig Deepwater Horizon and the subsequent oil spill.
Chris Oynes, the associate director of Offshore Energy and Minerals Management at the Service -- an agency blamed for lax inspection in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill -- informed colleagues in an e-mail that he will step down. He has come under fire from former MMS officials for being too close to the industry he regulated.
Oynes is responsible for the Outer Continental Shelf oil and gas program, as well as developing and implementing the new alternative energy program.
Oynes' biography on the Service's website notes that he has been involved in how the agency conducts its resource projections, environmental reviews and operational safeguards. He also was directly responsible for 30 lease sales.
His resignation came as Interior Secretary Ken Salazar unveiled a series of reforms to change the way the department conducts onshore oil and gas drilling.
He said they would "establish a more orderly, open, and environmentally sound process for developing oil and gas resources on public lands. The BP oil spill is a stark reminder of how we must continue to push ahead with the reforms we have been working on and which we know are needed."
Oynes' departure was welcomed on Capitol Hill.
Representative Nick Rahall, chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, said he hoped Oynes' retirement signaled an understanding that wholesale changes "will be necessary to fundamentally reform MMS."
"It represents an opportunity to begin anew with a clean slate, " said Rahall, whose committee is investigating MMS' regulation of offshore drilling activities.
Representative Darrell Issa, a longtime MMS critic and ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, issued a statement saying that Oynes' departure is a start.
"For more than a decade spanning three administrations, MMS has been a corrupt agency with an extensive history of mismanagement. This wasn't the doing of one single person, but rather the culmination of a bureaucratic breakdown. Removing one person might be a start, but MMS is in need of an exhaustive overhaul and comprehensive reform," Issa said.
Meanwhile, an administration official who asked to be anonymous said Monday that U.S. President Barack Obama will establish a presidential commission by executive order to investigate the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
The commission will be similar to panels created to investigate the space shuttle Challenger disaster and the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, and no current government employee or elected official will be eligible to serve on the commission, according to reports.
The commission will investigate a range of issues related to the spill and its aftermath, including rig safety and regulatory regimes on the local, state and federal levels. It will also take into account the investigations under way concerning the causes of the spill.
The Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, owned by Transocean and leased by BP, sank April 22 some 52 km off Venice, Louisiana, after burning for roughly 36 hours. The untapped wellhead continues gushing oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
