US House to take up oil industry bills
WASHINGTON — The US House of Representatives was set Friday to vote on bills to overhaul offshore drilling safety rules and protect whistleblowing workers, three months after the Gulf of Mexico…
WASHINGTON — The US House of Representatives was set Friday to vote on bills to overhaul offshore drilling safety rules and protect whistleblowing workers, three months after the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster.The White House-backed legislation would end a 75-million-dollar cap on energy firms' liability for economic damages from oil spills, a controversial provision that has run into stiff opposition in the Senate.The Consolidated Land, Energy, and Aquatic Resources (CLEAR) Act would also impose safety standards like independent certifications of critical equipment, increased inspections, and stiffer penalties for safety violations.It would deny new offshore drilling leases for up to seven years to companies, like BP, that have poor safety standards.It would also break up the embattled US Minerals Management Service to separate its inspection mission from its revenue-collection efforts and aims to end "revolving door" hiring with the oil and gas industry.The measure would also impose a new conservation fee of two dollars per barrel of oil and 20 cents per million British thermal units of natural gas for all oil and gas leases on federal onshore and offshore areas.The Offshore Oil and Gas Worker Whistleblower Protection Act, meanwhile, aims to give offshore oil firm workers who blow the whistle on health or safety issues their first ever legal protections from retaliation.The bill would extend protections to Outer Continental Shelf workers involved in oil and gas exploration, drilling, production, or cleanup.Lawmakers who backed the bill have pointed to accounts from relatives of the workers killed in the Deepwater Horizon blast that triggered the Gulf spill, who said their loved ones were afraid to report major safety concerns.The measure would notably forbid companies from firing or otherwise punishing a worker who reports, in good faith, a possible safety violation, either to their employer or to regulators. Copyright © 2010 AFP. All rights reserved. More »
last modification 2010-07-30 20:00:15
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