Oil majors urge lifting of offshore drilling ban on safety track record

In the wake of the worst environmental disaster from the BP rig in the Gulf of Mexico, the oil and gas industry's offshore safety and environmental record is being increasingly called into question. The record has been far worse that what industry leaders and lawmakers seem to think.

Many policymakers think the record has been spotless apart from the recent spill. Republican John J ''Jimmy'' Duncan Jr (R-Tennessee) said in a House hearing on Thursday, "It's almost an astonishingly safe, clean history that we have there in the gulf." According to interior secretary Ken Salazar the industry's "history of safety over all of those times" had provided the "empirical foundation" for US policy.

However, federal records between 1964 and 2009 tell a completely different story. There has been a steady stream of oil spills dumping 517,847 barrels of petroleum into the Gulf of Mexico during the period according to the records.

The spills have killed thousands of birds and soiled beaches as distant as Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula and together they have poured twice the amount of oil into US waters as did the Exxon Valdez tanker when it ran aground in 1989.

Though the industry had been improving its record prior the BP spill, the largest one was in 2009 that spilled 1,500 barrels, the amount that was gushing every hour from BP's damaged well, before it was capped last week.

However, a handful of spills do take place annually as a from blowouts, hurricanes, lax pipeline maintenance, tanker leaks and human error, figures kept by the Minerals Management Service, now known as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement show.