Brazilian Regulation on Oil Spill: The Need of Review

Abstract

Abstract The Brazilian oil spill response main regulation has been under a major review for the last couple of years. The origins of this regulation date back to the year 2000, when two accidents of great relevance happened: the Guanabara Bay and the Iguaçu River oil spills. These two accidents quickened the promulgation of the first version of this regulation, an adaptation of the USA framework for facilities transferring oil or hazardous material in bulk (33 CFR part 154). The major changes made during this adaptation to the Brazilian laws were: 01) The scope has been expanded to cover not only transferring coastal facilities, like ports and Abstract number oil terminals, but also oil rigs, offshore oil production units, pipelines and refineries. In a later revision other facilities were included: marinas, onshore oil rigs, shipyards and nautical clubs; 02) The response resources could only be provided by the owner of the facility, which has restrained the potential benefits of a shared capability approach like, for example, a specialized response company or association that could support several facilities in a region; In practice, the application of the same ground rule for inland, coastal and offshore facilities resulted in several distortions, like a dominance of the mechanical removal technique over other response techniques. This also resulted in the application of response time requirements designed for oil terminals to offshore facilities, resulting in an oversized dedicated oil spill response fleet. In addition, this rule is inadequate to linear spill sources, like marine pipelines, and inland facilities, like refineries. Finally, because of the aforementioned distortions and also some lack of technical guidance for relevant topics, like coastal protection, oil trajectory forecasting modelling, wildlife response planning, among others, several different interpretations of the national regulation have arrived from different levels of governmental agencies. This not only allowed for distinct requirements over time from a same agency but also created confusion when comparing the response capabilities of similar installations from different regions of Brazil. Thus, the purpose of this article is to describe the improvements proposed by the Oil and Gas producers to review the Brazilian regulation. It aims at presenting the key elements and references used in the review process and the predicted response structure that could arise in order to improve Brazil's environmental safety after the new regulation is in force.