The National Oil Spill Commission recommended that Congress significantly raise the liability cap, and Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, who has authored legislation to implement many of the commission's recommendations, goes even further in his bill, which would remove the cap altogether.
Otherwise, he said, the taxpayers are on the hook to make up the difference.
At a committee hearing on Republican bills to speed the pace of permitting and open new offshore areas to drilling, Markey pressed the liability issue in his questioning of Hank Danos, president of Danos and Curole Marine Contractors, an oilfield service company based in Larose, who had been called to testify about how the slowdown in drilling had led him to lay off 200 workers.
"Do you believe that a $75 million penalty for the kind of spill we saw is high enough, or should it be higher?" asked Markey, demanding an answer as Danos struggled to say that anything that increased costs wasn't helpful.
When it came his turn to ask questions, Landry revisited the liability issue with Danos.
"Mr. Danos, you do a lot of work for shallow-water drilling contractors. Could you tell me if they remove the liability cap on the (Outer Continental) Shelf, the impact for those oil and gas contractors?" asked Landry, noting that most of those shallow-water companies are relatively small.
"My understanding is that if the liability cap was removed, that there would be more wells shut in and shut down, and less production in the Gulf of Mexico," Danos said.
"So it would destroy the shallow water drilling industry," Landry said. "Is that what it would do?"
"It could," Danos said.
But at an afternoon hearing of the House Science Committee's subcommittee on Energy and the Environment, Molly Macauley, research director for Resources for the Future, an independent research center, suggested that "limited liability and sometimes-ineffective regulatory oversight can lead people to naturally underinvest in safety."
