Oil producers should share incident data: Salazar

TRONDHEIM, Norway, June 27 (Reuters) - Oil producing nations should establish a global incident database and share more information to reduce accident risk even as the global offshore exploration sector booms, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar said on Wednesday.

"This is a global industry and most of the companies operate all across the world," Salazar told Reuters in Norway's third largest city. "The oceans of the world are connected, it's all one ocean."

"The more information that can be shared around the Earth, the better equipped all nations will be in terms of preventing new accidents," Salazar said on the sidelines of a conference.

Salazar added that the U.S. has made solid progress in oil safety since BP's Macondo accident in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 and he now considered its regulation as exemplary.

"The oil and gas industry is a global industry and we are setting the gold standard in the United States and we want the rest of the world to join us in the efforts," Salazar said. "We are much more confident today than we were a few years ago."

Exploration activity in Gulf of Mexico continued to return to normal this month in the first federal auction for drilling rights in the gulf's prolific central region since BP's disastrous oil spill.

The lease sale attracted over $1.7 billion in high bids with 56 companies taking part in the auction, indicating that interest remained high even within the new regulatory framework.

Salazar added that the U.S. continued to work on new regulations, including one on blowout preventers, a mechanism which failed in BP's case, leading to the spill.