Times-Picayune:
Even when the moratorium on deepwater oil and gas drilling ends, it won’t mean an immediate restart of operations in the Gulf of Mexico, the federal government’s chief oil and gas regulator said Monday.
“You won’t see drilling the next day, or even the next week,” Michael Bromwich, director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Regulation and Enforcement, told the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling.
Bromwich said he will issue a report later this week on whether the moratorium, now slated to end Nov. 30, can end early.
Bromwich said it may take time, as it has with shallow-water drillers not officially covered by the moratorium, for companies to develop and win approval for their drilling plans. He said federal regulators say drilling can start again once a response plan dealing with a “worst-case scenario spill” has been prepared. He called this justifiable.
Some of the delay is because the industry needs time to develop such plans, but Bromwich acknowledged that his department needs to increase staffing and training to conduct the kind of oversight that is necessary to assure safe operations.
The rest here.