The Biden administration on Tuesday finalized tighter rules for complex devices meant to prevent catastrophic blowouts on offshore oil and gas drilling rigs, reversing some Trump administration policies and returning to a more stringent regulatory stance adopted after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster.
Failure of blowout preventer equipment was a major cause of the April 2010 disaster that killed 11 workers and resulted in an estimated 130 million gallons of crude oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico over 87 days.
