The nation's top regulator of offshore drilling today said his agency is planning new steps in the coming months to strengthen worker safety and prevent blowouts following the Deepwater Horizon spill.

Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement Director James Watson said his agency will soon complete the final drilling safety rule that it issued as an interim, emergency rule immediately following the BP PLC spill.

In addition. the agency will soon finalize a rule to buttress its safety and environmental management systems and will propose new standards for how blowout preventers are designed and maintained over their lifetime, Watson said.

"The aggressive pace of reform since the Deepwater Horizon is remarkable, but my agency has much more work to do," Watson wrote in an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle today.

His comments come on the two-year anniversary of the spill, which claimed 11 lives and discharged nearly 5 million barrels of crude into the Gulf of Mexico.

Since the spill, new safety standards have been implemented governing everything from how wells are drilled, cemented and tested to how risks to workers are minimized, Watson said. In addition, the Interior Department has completed a successful restructuring to divorce safety oversight from development and revenue collection.

Watson said he intends to also strengthen the way offshore drilling equipment is examined to ensure its operation is sound both today and into the future.

"Offshore exploration and production operations -- much like commercial aircraft -- are now so complex that the traditional, 'snap shot' examination of the adequacy of equipment or procedures cannot guard against equipment or human failure," he said. "In other words, we not only need to look at whether a complicated piece of equipment works today, but also whether it is being built and maintained to perform to its design over its entire lifecycle."

But the reforms come amid continued skepticism over the safety of offshore drilling. In the past year alone, three significant leaks have occurred off the coasts of China and Brazil and in the North Sea by major oil companies, demonstrating, for many, how risky offshore drilling continues to be.

"The risks will only increase as drilling moves into deeper waters with harsher, less familiar environmental conditions," said a report this week by the former members of the president's BP Oil Spill Commission (Greenwire, April 17).

The report found that while federal agencies and industry have made significant safety reforms after the worst oil spill in the nation's history, Congress has failed to pass a single bill that would help prevent another catastrophe.

Oceana, an environmental group opposed to oil and gas drilling in the Gulf, issued its own report this week charging that the measures adopted by government and industry are "woefully inadequate."

Michael Bromwich, the former director of BSEE, who is now managing principal of the Bromwich Group, today said the reorganization of the former Minerals Management Service has created a regulator that can better keep pace with the risks of offshore drilling.

But he, too, outlined additional reforms that must take place to ensure that safety and prevention are in stride with technology's ability to drill to new depths and in frontier areas such as the Arctic.

"Advances in these areas must be broadly, and freely, shared within industry and with the government," Bromwich wrote in an op-ed today in Politico.

In addition, a public-private research collaborative should be established to gauge impacts of development in sensitive marine waters. Federal agencies must have the resources to attract the most talented engineers and pursue exchange programs with industry and with foreign regulators, he said.

Lastly, Bromwich echoed a recommendation of the BP spill commission in urging Congress to ensure that agencies have sustained funding in the face of lean fiscal times.

Congress, however, is viewed as the least dependable partner in efforts to overhaul the nation's drilling regime.

While Congress has approved significant funding boosts over the past two years, it has failed to codify Interior's safety or structural reforms; raise liability caps or civil penalties to deter risky drilling; or boost funding to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which now collaborates more closely with Interior on drilling decisions.

"It is extraordinary that Congress has completely abdicated its responsibility," said Regan Nelson, a senior oceans advocate with the Natural Resources Defense Council (E&E Daily, April 20).

The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee last year came close to passing comprehensive oil spill response legislation but was stymied by disagreements over whether coastal states should receive a cut of the revenues that currently go to the U.S. Treasury. Lawmakers on the panel appear as entrenched today as they ever were (E&ENews PM, April 18).