A top Interior Department official today called for the establishment of a new ocean energy safety institute to enhance collaboration among government, industry, academia and the environmental community on how to keep pace with the rapid evolution of offshore drilling technologies.

Deputy Secretary David Hayes suggested the institute may be established by secretarial order if Congress fails to act.

The institute, which Interior first proposed to Congress in the months after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, comes as companies expand drilling into deeper waters, higher-pressure reservoirs and frontier regions like the Arctic.

Investigations of the Deepwater Horizon spill concluded that government officials had neither the expertise nor the resources necessary to oversee BP PLC's well-containment efforts.

"How can we ensure the government overseers and regulators are up to speed with the technology and have the know-how to interact with the technologists at the oil and gas industry that are on the cutting edge, which continues to push forward?" Hayes said in an address this morning to the agency's Ocean Energy Safety Advisory Committee in Washington, D.C. "The goal is to enable and ensure that as the technology moves forward, so does the knowledge and ability to address safety and environmental issues associated with that cutting-edge technology."

Hayes said he is hoping the institute can find a "synergistic role" with the National Academy of Sciences, which may soon be the recipient of $500 million from oil spill settlements with BP and Transocean, the owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig.

Interior proposed the institute as part of a post-spill legislative package to Congress that included the reorganization of the troubled Minerals Management Service.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar later split MMS into the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, with revenue collection functions housed in the secretary's office. But Congress has failed to codify the agencies or enact most of the agency's other recommendations.

Hayes' remarks come as the 15-member committee nears the end of its two-year charter and prepares to issue a range of safety recommendations, including the establishment of a safety institute.

Salazar in 2010 said the institute would support research, development and training to tackle offshore drilling safety, blowout containment and oil spill response.

The concept was later endorsed by the president's BP oil spill commission, which recommended such an institute include Interior, the Coast Guard, and the Department of Energy and its national laboratories.

Charlie Williams, a former chief scientist at Royal Dutch Shell PLC, said the institute would complement the work he oversees at the Center for Offshore Safety, an industry-backed group launched recently to provide training in safety management systems.

"It goes way beyond our mission," said Williams, who serves on the committee, of the proposed institute.

"This is really going to work on technologies that support drilling safety and cleanup technology," he added. "It's going to really look ... and say, 'Are there gaps?' And if there are gaps, it's going to propose people who could work on things to close the gaps."

Arctic issues

Hayes also said the agency supports the committee's recommendations to establish regulations specific to Arctic drilling.

The meeting came months after Shell concluded a drilling season marked by a handful of operational and regulatory mishaps, the latest of which involved the grounding of a drillship loaded with fuel. None of the ship's 143,000 gallons of diesel was spilled, and only a few minor injuries were sustained.

Salazar yesterday said he had "a troubling sense" about how many things went wrong for Shell, which has not said whether its drilling plans for 2013 have changed.

Interior this week launched a high-level, expedited review of Shell's 2012 season.

"We agree the Arctic is a frontier environment," said Hayes, who noted that Interior is requiring that Shell have a rig on hand to drill a relief well and to maintain on-scene containment and capping stack capabilities in the Arctic -- steps that are not required of shallow-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

The advisory committee would like those kinds of regulations to be standardized for Arctic drilling.

Hayes also said an interagency working group the president established in summer 2011 to coordinate energy permitting in Alaska is supporting a more "holistic" way of conducting environmental reviews.

For example, Interior was able to avoid a "siloed" review of Shell's oil spill response plan in the Arctic by involving U.S. EPA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Coast Guard, he said.

The working group, which he leads, is nearing completion of a report to the president that will highlight the importance of science to the agency's decisionmaking.