BP Gulf Oil Spill

The tragic April 20 explosion that destroyed BP's Deepwater Horizon oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 crew members, didn't happen in a vacuum.

BP clearly is culpable. And the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service, now known as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, shares in the blame, for failing to exercise proper oversight.

Many other factors also contributed to the accident, however.

First among them is the important issue of ownership. BP did not own the Deepwater Horizon, but leased it from another company, Transocean. The contractual relationship between Transocean and BP created a classic "principal-agent" problem in which the duties and responsibilities of the lessor, or owner, and lessee, the renter, may not have been spelled out adequately...

A second contributor to the disaster is the federal law limiting liability for damages caused by offshore oil spills...

Third, BP may have been misled in calculating its exposure to risk by MMS computer models that predict the likely path of large-scale oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico...

Fourth, BP and other oil companies have been forced to drill in ultra-deep waters as a result of federal laws and White House and court rulings that limit access to oil reserves in shallower waters and on federally owned land in the continental United States...

There is plenty of blame to go around for the Deepwater Horizon disaster. But don't jump to the conclusion that the best way to prevent future catastrophes is simply through further regulation.

More regulation will not necessarily work any better than existing regulation. What will work is getting the incentives right — through clearly defined ownership, responsibility and liability — and exploiting proven oil reserves onshore and in shallow waters offshore.

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