The fossil fuel industry is breaking the law, leaving taxpayers to pay the cost

The United States’ top federal auditor, the Governmental Accountability Office (GAO), just released a report chronicling an ongoing crime wave on America’s public waters.

This scathing report found threats to navigation, imperiled safety of American mariners and offshore workers, pollution that harms communities and fisheries, and a looming tab that could cost the American public between $40 and $70 billion. Surprised you haven’t read anything about this yet? Keep reading.

Violating federal law, regulation, and even explicit contracts with the American government, the perpetrators include some of the largest oil and gas companies on the planet who act with impunity. Even more shocking is that the regulators who are supposed to prevent this are either unwilling or unable to stop them.

The GAO found that despite these companies’ eye-watering profits, they have left 700 offshore oil and gas wells and 500 platforms that are past due for dismantling and decommissioning in the Gulf of Mexico. The GAO also found that the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE), the enforcement agency patrolling oil and gas operations in American waters, is failing to hold companies who are breaking the law accountable.

When we think of a crime wave, we think of carjackings and pickpockets – theft of personal property at the personal level. We tend not to think of shadowy suits in London or Houston failing to clean up hulking and rusting platforms creaking in an ocean breeze – or hurling projectiles during a category five hurricane. But these are indeed crimes, and these oil and gas CEOs are getting off scot-free.

This issue is not something new. As a policy analyst in the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, I was tasked with exploring possible in-house solutions to deal with the trash left behind by oil and gas companies rusting in the Gulf and how we could prevent it from happening in the future.

I explored a variety of options, including a legislative option to impose a new industry-wide severance tax and establish a decommissioning trust fund to protect the American public from the looming bill left by oil and gas companies. And even years before, an internal government memo from the then Marine Minerals Service (MMS) circa 1990, detailed the exact same problems I was trying to solve and were later confirmed by the GAO report.

One would assume that big oil and gas companies and private equity firms making record-breaking profits could easily clean up their messes in our waters. Just in the last nine years, the Gulf OCS produced enough crude oil to generate an estimated $76 billion in profit siphoned from our public resources, which is more than enough to pay the cost of decommissioning every rig and well in the Gulf of Mexico. Despite those profits and ample warning, over 75 percent of end-of-lease and idle infrastructure in the Gulf of Mexico was overdue, according to BSEE’s deadlines.

Private companies who drill in the Outer Continental Shelf – and make a significant profit off our waters – are legally obliged to “permanently plug wells, remove platforms and other facilities, decommission pipelines, and clear the seafloor of all associated obstructions created by the lease operations” within one year of ceasing commercial operations. This is a common sense obligation, but it doesn’t do much good when regulators fail to enforce it. Instead, as the GAO report found, the burden of cleaning up these operations is falling on the American public. Instead of building bridges and investing in our communities, we are picking up their tab.

The grand irony of all of this is that the economic activity spurred by stepping up enforcement of these obligations could be significant. Enforcing decommissioning obligations could begin immediately, utilizing workforces and equipment today. A 2022 study estimates that decommissioning Gulf of Mexico infrastructure “would create 5,265 jobs per year to complete this work, including direct workers, contractors, and suppliers, [and] more than 10,500 jobs per year, economy-wide.” It would also make more seafloor available for other uses like dredging for coastal restoration and offshore wind.

BSEE and BOEM must exercise their authority and hold these companies accountable for breaking the law, fleecing the American public, and destroying our natural resources. Consequences must be swift, public, and coercive enough to compel compliance with the law or kick out bad operators.  It’s time to stop kicking the can. We didn’t create the problem, but it’s high time we dealt with it. It’s time to restore law and order to the high seas and protect the waters that belong to the American people, not oil and gas companies.