Is Offshore Drilling Really Going to Solve Our Problems?

Is Offshore Drilling Really Going to Solve Our Problems?

Is Offshore Drilling Really Going to Solve Our Problems?
Is offshore drilling really the answer to helping our economy, or is it just a smoke and mirrors sham allowing oil companies the opportunity to rape and pillage this environmentally fragile ecosystem in the pursuit of ever-higher profits? Today there are thousands platforms that operate within the boundaries of U.S. waters. Now the government wants to allow even more offshore drilling in various areas. So what exactly is offshore drilling and how much crude oil will these new offshore rigs give the United States? How is it possible for the government to allow more offshore drilling? How will offshore drilling allegedly help the economy? Will it cause irreversible harm to the environment, and could it potentially hurt the economy? Overall, offshore drilling is not the answer to making our economy better, it will cause damage to our environment, and it could make our economy worse off. Offshore drilling is indeed a false hope.
To begin, in the article Offshore Drilling: Worth the Oil, or False Hope?, the term offshore drilling means to extract oil from fields that lie beneath the ocean floor, anywhere from a few hundred feet to 200 miles off the coast. The article also informs us that according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s overview of offshore activity, 565 million barrels of oil are currently being produced per year; which roughly equals 1.5 million barrels per day. The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s overview of offshore activity goes on to say current U.S. oil consumption is 21 million barrels per day and nearly 8 billion barrels of oil per year (Connors). Currently offshore drilling meets only a small portion of the overall need for crude oil. If the United States were to use more offshore drilling the Minerals Management Service (MMS) estimates that there are 76 billion barrels of “remaining undiscovered technically recoverable” oil in the U.S. offshore regions. Of these 76...

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