"We are notifying offshore operators of their legal responsibility to decommission and dismantle their facilities when production is completed," said Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar in a statement.

"We have placed the industry on notice that they will be held to the highest standards of planning and operations in developing leases," he added in the joint announcement with Michael Bromwich, director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE) which regulates offshore drilling.

The new mandates are being imposed on an industry shaken by this year's huge oil spill "as part of our sustained effort to improve the safety of energy production on the outer continental shelf (OCS) and strengthen environmental protections," Salazar said.

According to the new regulations, put forward in a notice to lessees which goes into effect October 15, companies will be required to plug wells that have been inactive for five years, and that production platforms and pipelines must be decommissioned if they are not being actively used.

Thousands of idle or abandoned wells lie on the ocean floor, some of them decades old.

Bromwich, President Barack Obama's recent pick to head BOEMRE, warned that as infrastructure ages, the risk of damage increases, particularly during storm season.

Timely dismantling of what is known in the industry as "idle iron" would "substantially reduce such hazards," Bromwich said.

The notice to lessees states that the idle infrastructure "poses a potential threat to the OCS environment and is a financial liability to you and possibly the federal government if subsequently destroyed or damaged in a future event such as a hurricane."

The wells affected are nearly 3,500 non-producing wells currently topped with a subsurface safety valve instead of a more permanent seal, while some 650 platforms could be ordered dismantled if no longer being used for exploration or production.

The Gulf of Mexico is a vital US energy producer. About 25 percent of American domestic oil and gas supply comes from the Gulf's OCS, according to a Louisiana State University study published in 2007 by the US Department of the Interior.

More than 40,000 wells have been drilled in the Gulf's outer continental shelf since the beginning of offshore production in 1947, according to the study.

It said that as of 2007 nearly 6,500 producing wells and 33,000 miles (53,000 kilometers) of pipeline were in use.

earlier related report
Storm Karl hits Mexico, threatens Gulf oil installations
Cancun, Mexico (AFP) Sept 15, 2010 - Tropical storm Karl soaked parts of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula Wednesday and headed toward Gulf oil installations, as a rare duo of powerful hurricanes roiled waters far out in the Atlantic.

Karl, the 11th named storm of the season which forecasters have predicted could be one of the worst on record, dumped more rain on Mexico which is already struggling with heavy flooding in southeastern states.

The storm unleashed heavy rains in the extreme west of the Yucatan and affected Mayan ruins in Tulum, although the sun was out in the beach resort of Cancun further north.

Karl also "threatens installations of state oil company Pemex, because the system will pass very nearby," said Jaime Albarran of the National Meteorological Service, which released a moderate alert.

Pemex said its operations around the eastern Campeche Sound, where most of its crude is produced, appeared unaffected so far.

Mexican authorities meanwhile ordered evacuations around Quintana Roo state's capital Chetumal.

At 2100 GMT, the storm was slowly weakening, with sustained winds of 75 kilometers (45 miles) per hour. The eye of the storm was located 130 kilometers (80 miles) northwest of Chetumal, moving west, according to the US National Hurricane Center (NHC).

It was set to weaken as it crossed the peninsula through the night before intensifying again as it emerged into the Gulf of Mexico early Thursday, the NHC said.

The Mexican government discontinued the tropical storm warning for the east Yucatan but the NHC warned Karl could bring coastal flooding and up to 20 centimeters (eight inches) of rain to Mexico and parts of Belize and northern Guatemala.

Nearly a million people have been affected by flooding in Mexico this month alone, including 25 who died. The rains, which began in July, are set to worsen as the rainy season continues to almost the end of the year.

Behind Karl, two potent Atlantic hurricanes were churning simultaneously -- the first time in a decade there have been two category four storms in the seas at the seas time, forecasters said, but they posed no immediate threat to land.

Hurricane Julia weakened slightly after surging overnight, with forecasters downgrading its strength to a category three status, with top sustained winds at 205 kilometers (125 miles) per hour, as it moved far out in the Atlantic.

Igor however remained a massive category four storm, the second most powerful hurricane on the five-point Saffir-Simpson scale, packing top winds of 215 kilometers an hour (135 miles an hour).

The hurricane was not expected to make landfall for days but forecasters said storm swells would reach Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and part of the Bahamas by early Thursday. Related swells were also due to reach the US East Coast Thursday, Friday and into the weekend.

"These swells are likely to cause life-threatening surf and rip current conditions," the NHC warned.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) has predicted 14 to 23 named storms for this season, including eight to 14 hurricanes.

On average, there are 11 named storms, six of which become hurricanes, in a six-month season.

There has been unusually high storm activity since 1995, according to the NOAA.

earlier related report
BP boss defends safety record to British MPs
London (AFP) Sept 15, 2010 - BP chief Tony Hayward defended the firm's safety procedures as British MPs grilled him over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill Wednesday, amid reports that BP is on the verge of sealing the well.

Hayward said the spill -- the worst environmental catastrophe in US history -- was "devastating" to him personally but denied that there had been any cost-cutting at the energy giant in the run-up to the accident.

But he admitted to a parliamentary committee that BP was reviewing its risk assessment procedures and also its relationship with contractors, blamed by the firm for problems with the rig and well.

"This particular incident is so devastating to me personally because we made enormous progress" on safety measures before the disaster, Hayward told the Energy and Climate Change Committee.

Asked whether BP was still a suitable firm to carry out drilling operations in the North Sea in the wake of the Gulf of Mexico spill, he said BP's safety record was "better than the industry average."

He said BP had invested 14 billion dollars (10.8 billion euros) on safety in the three years prior to the blast on the Deepwater Horizon rig in April, which killed 11 people and unleashed millions of barrels of oil into the sea.

The leaking well took around three months to cap.

Hayward said the company had not taken fully into account the likely impact of events like the Gulf of Mexico spill because it believed its own safety procedures had made such a disaster impossible.

"The industry had drilled for 20 years in deep water without a blow out," he said.

He said BP was now "looking very closely across the company at the low-probability, high-impact risks" that it had previously believed it had "effectively mitigated."

Hayward -- whose resignation after a string of PR gaffes takes effect on October 1 -- reiterated the claims in BP's own report into the disaster released earlier this month that contractors were partly to blame.

Without directly naming rig owner Transocean and contractor Halliburton, which cemented the well, he said: "BP will look very hard at the relationship between the company and contractors in the light of this tragedy."

He also sought to play down a Financial Times report on Wednesday that BP failed to comply with emergency regulations on oil spills at four out of five of its North Sea installations which were inspected last year.

"I don't believe that the report this morning points to any fundamental weakness in our North Sea operations," he said, adding that spills at BP facilities there had dropped by 20 percent in the last two years.

He acknowledged that the US anger in the wake of the disaster was "understandable" and refused to be drawn by lawmakers on whether he felt he had been unfairly treated.

"Given the scale of the tragedy and the enormous impact of the disaster, the amount of anger in the US was quite understandable," he said.

Hayward, 53, faced US lawmakers in June at a bad-tempered hearing.

He announced his resignation the same month and handed over day-to-day management of the crisis in June to American Bob Dudley.

In the United States Wednesday, a top official said that BP was on the verge of finishing drilling operations to seal the blown-out Macondo well in the Gulf that had sent the oil gushing into the sea.

The well could be declared permanently "killed" by Sunday, said retired US Coast Guard admiral Thad Allen.

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