HOUSTON -- Leaders in the oil spill response, containment and cleanup industry are promising a renewed postelection push to get a provision enacted into law protecting response crews from the threat of lawsuits.

One place they may look to insert it is into the next Coast Guard authorization bill. But ideally such legal protections should be passed and signed into law by President Obama before the end of this year, said top officials at the Spill Control Association of America (SCAA).

Failing that, SCAA says it will continue the effort to lobby on behalf of a legal immunity provision. Should legal immunity for oil spill workers not get adopted this year, then lawmakers can expect the idea to top the list of priorities for the industry and a focal point of a campaign during the organization's next annual meeting, SCAA Executive Director John Allen and President Andrew Altendorf said in an interview with EnergyWire.

"Both the Marine Well Containment Co. and the Helix Well Containment Group are members of a coalition for responder immunity, which we are, as well as other associations and individual companies," Allen said. "They're very concerned that we don't, in the future, end up with what I call these frivolous class-action suits or personal liability cases because we did the right thing using the right technology, but somebody got a bent nose."

Altendorf said the issue of responder immunity is perhaps the top item for discussions at the annual Clean Gulf conference under way in New Orleans. He argued that it is the single biggest gap left in a spill response infrastructure that has become much more sophisticated since the disastrous 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the largest in U.S. history.

Allen and Altendorf spoke by phone from the conference.

"We're trying to amend the [Oil Pollution Act of 1990] to close the loopholes and the gaps that allowed a bunch of these lawsuits to occur during and after Deepwater Horizon," Allen said. "We're trying to find the right bill to put it into, and right now we're looking at the Coast Guard authorization bill, which would be for fiscal year 2014."

Other preparation left to do -- including a Coast Guard assessment and ratings of different skimmer equipment and a complete national inventory of all spill response gear -- will be completed soon, perhaps in the next few weeks, Altendorf said.

Once all the necessary legal and organizational pieces are in place, then the public can expect a much swifter and better response to an accidental crude oil spill or well blowout if one were to occur again, the two association leaders said.

"There were a lot of lessons learned on the [2010] spill," Altendorf said. Knowledge and experience attained during the Macondo well blowout, on in-situ burning and chemical dispersants in particular, has enhanced the oil and gas industry's technical skills, he said, and proven containment technologies would keep the volumes of oil released into the environment at much lower levels than witnessed two years ago.

"In any future big spill you're going to see those two things, in my opinion, continue to happen because of lessons learned and the perfection of those two processes," Altendorf added.

Need for change

SCAA estimates that its membership has shot up by 15 percent to 20 percent since the 2010 Gulf oil spill. The organization's level of activity has also increased, with regular meetings between members and government agencies and SCAA's "Day on the Hill" event that puts spill response industry insiders in front of lawmakers to give updates and address lingering problems.

Both Allen and Altendorf agree that the Gulf spill was a watershed moment for their organization, which was formed in 1973 "to actively promote the interests of all groups within the spill response community," according to SCAA's website.

The SCAA leaders criticized their industry for being too wedded to older ways of doing things, clinging hard to standard spill containment booms, dispersants and technologies and techniques that dated back to the beginning of such work and rejecting alternative technologies that many tried to introduce. The Macondo spill changed that, they said, and as a result new ways are rapidly emerging that improve the environmental record of offshore oil drilling.

"We've learned the lesson that we need to always keep an eye open for new technological advances, and I would say that the oil spill response community for many, many years was sort of reluctant to change," Allen said. "There are options, alternative technologies, that ought to be brought to bear, and I think that as our organization expands we'd like to bring some of those in."