From the editor: Oil and gas, bobbing and weaving

Remember the J.R. character in the old “Dallas” TV show? With his black hat and blacker heart, old J.R. came to represent the energy industry to millions of Americans, many of whom had to wait in line for expensive gasoline back then.
Now the industry’s condition brings to mind another notable figure from the 1970s: Chuck Wepner, a boxer known as the Bayonne Bleeder. Everybody’s taking shots at the oil and gas people these days.
In St. Mary Parish, about one employee in nine, more than 2,400 people, works either in oil and gas production or in some support role.
The industry, and a bunch of other people, too, ducked one punch Thursday when the Federal Reserve leadership decided not to raise interest rates after all. For a few months, a rate hike seemed likely in view of the Fed’s fear of inflation and the return to something like consistently healthy job creation.
But with oil selling at $46 a barrel, down from $107 in mid-2014, energy companies don’t really need to be forced to pay more for their debt.
Bill Marin, the chairman of the board at Patterson State Bank, noted this week (before the Fed’s decision) that rising interest rates wouldn’t be bad for everyone.
“It’s like a double-edged sword,” Marin said. “It’s good for some people and bad for others.”
For people who rely on certificates of deposit, maybe for their retirement income, the historic low rates of the past seven or eight years have been a real burden.
If you want to build or buy a house, low interest has created opportunities to save money.
But decisions like that don’t get made in a vacuum. Marin said the dip in oil prices means uncertainty among workers about job security.
Investors have a volatile world situation to contend with, he said.
All of that means businesses will think twice before planning new hiring or expansion.
“They don’t want to go out and borrow a lot of money with the uncertainty,” Marin said. “If rates start going up, it’s definitely not going to help.”
Another blow could land on offshore oil and gas production, which Chris John of the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association recently cited as a bright spot during the oil price downturn. The Obama administration has proposed a new and long-delayed set of regulations in response to the 2010 BP oil spill.
The rules would tighten regulations governing blowout preventers. You’ll remember that the failure of a blowout preventer played a big part in the BP disaster.
Companies would also be required to do real-time monitoring of drilling operations and do more record-keeping, according to The Associated Press.
Republicans in Congress say there’s no proof the rules would do any good and that they’re a costly burden to energy companies. The American Petroleum Institute says compliance would cost $32 billion over 10 years.
The Obama administration estimates the cost at $1 billion.
As poor as the timing of these new rules seems to be, there’s one reason not to reject them out of hand. Remember the BP oil spill commission, which investigated the causes of the disaster? In its final report, the commission said that between 2004 and 2009, the years leading up to the Macondo blast, job-related deaths among American offshore workers occurred at nearly four times the rate as was the case with platforms in European waters.
And that was true even though conditions in the North Sea are rougher than in the Gulf and — here’s the kicker — many of the same companies work in both areas.
That makes it seem as though companies working in the Gulf are no safer than the government requires.
Bill Decker is managing editor of The Daily Review. Reach him at bdecker@daily-review.com.