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The Interior Department could make the
announcement as early as Monday, the paper said. It is timed to
coincide with the five-year anniversary of the BP <BP.L>
disaster, which killed 11 men and sent millions of barrels of
oil spewing into the gulf.
The rule is expected to tighten safety requirements on blowout
preventers, devices that are the last line of protection to stop
explosions in undersea oil and gas wells, the Times reported.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for
comment.
The explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in 2010 was
caused in part when the buckling of a section of drill pipe led
to the malfunction of a supposedly fail-safe blowout preventer
on a BP well, the paper said.
The regulation comes as the Obama administration is taking steps
to open up vast new areas of federal waters off the southeast
Atlantic Coast to drilling, a decision that has infuriated
environmentalists, the Times reported.
It will be the third and biggest new drilling-equipment
regulation put forth by the Obama administration in response to
the disaster, the Times said. In 2010, the Interior Department
announced new regulations on drilling well casings, and in 2012,
it announced new regulations on the cementing of wells.
(Reporting by Eric Beech; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)
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