The on-line magazine Good has created an infographic which asks the question “How Much Oil Do We Get From Offshore Drilling?”. While the data it contains is interesting, the colors are garish, and I am not sure it answers the question on whether or not we should continue offshore drilling.
I do know that in most catastrophic failures, it is not one failure that leads to a problem, but instead it is a series of cascading failures. If you stop one of the failures, then the catastrophic failure does not occur. In the case of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, it appears that several warning signs were overlooked, and several safety features failed. Therefore I would rather continue to drill offshore with people paying attention to safety (instead of schedule and profit) than to stop offshore drilling and buy oil from regimes like Venezuela and the Middle East.
As the Deepwater Horizon continues to leak oil at a rapid rate, many people are asking whether we should be drilling in the Gulf of Mexico at all, while others say offshore drilling in the Gulf is a necessary source of oil. To help settle this debate, this is a look at oil around the world, who is producing the most, and what we use it for in this country.
