The U.S. Department of the Interior lacks a robust oversight process to monitor and ensure the safety and integrity of some 8,600 miles of active offshore oil and gas pipelines located on the seafloor of the Gulf of Mexico, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in a report made public on Monday. According to GAO, the Interior’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) needs to improve the process of monitoring the operations and safety of the pipelines and their eventual decommissioning. “Pipelines can contain oil or gas if not properly cleaned in decommissioning. But the Bureau doesn’t ensure that standards, like cleaning and burial, are met. It also doesn’t monitor pipeline condition or movement from currents over time,” the report from GAO found. BSEE does not generally conduct or require any subsea inspections of active pipelines and relies on surface observations once a month, as well as […]