The Interior Department is taking pains to show it's dotting every "i" before approving Royal Dutch Shell’s plan to begin drilling in fragile Arctic seas off Alaska’s coast this summer.

The department's offshore drilling safety chief on Thursday will personally review the "capping stack" — a vital piece of equipment if there's a blowout — that Shell will have positioned in the Arctic (it's in Portland, Ore. right now).

On Wednesday, Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) Director James Watson was in Seattle to check out the two drilling rigs that Shell plans to use for its long-planned — and long-delayed — drilling in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas off Alaska's coast.