On the recordJune 21, 2010
I rise today to join with my colleagues Senator Mark Udall and Chairman Jeff Bingaman of the Senate Energy Committee to introduce the Department of the Interior Research and Technologies for Oil Spill Prevention and Response Act of 2010. Legislation intended to make sure we have the proper resources available to respond to future oil spills. While we are still getting to the bottom of what caused the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf, one thing is absolutely clear: BP was totally unprepared to respond, contain and clean-up this kind of spill. From 'junk shots' to containment domes that failed to work at depth, BP was caught totally flat footed by this spill. Even BP's CEO, Tony Hayward, admitted that BP didn't 'have the tools in the toolbox' to respond to this spill. The oil and gas industry has poured significant sums of money into developing technologies to find and produce oil and gas, but when I asked oil executives at a recent Energy Committee hearing what they've done in the way of research and development to respond to and clean up oil spills the response I got was: little to nothing. The technologies being used today in the Gulf are the same technologies we used twenty years ago to clean-up the Exxon Valdez spill. The oil and gas industry needs to do better. Since they won't do it themselves, they can pay the government to lead on research and development.
