Persuasive Essay On Drilling

Oil is one of the largest sources of power in the world. People use it in their homes for heat and in their cars for fuel. While the demand for oil keeps growing in our society every day, the supply keeps getting lower and “with shallow-water and near shore reserves increasingly tapped out in the Gulf of Mexico, oil companies are being forced into more challenging terrain to sustain domestic energy production” (Schmidt A395). With these companies being forced into more difficult landscapes, things ae bound to go wrong whether it is a pipeline leaking or a fire breaking out. Not only can an accident like this hurt the people on the rig but it can also be devastating to the environment. Drilling in the Arctic should be stopped because the negative effects far outweigh the positive ones. There are many arguments that drilling in the Arctic should be allowed. The first argument is that there is an extremely large amount of untapped resources beneath the surface. According to recent government estimates “Scientists believe the geology underlying the Chukchi and Beaufort

The equipment used to drill for oil is extremely unsafe and can lead to people being injured. Deepwater Horizon is one of the largest oil rig disasters in recent memory, where eleven people died and over one million barrels of oil were leaked into the ocean (“BP was negligent” 1). While these may seem like rare occurrences, between the year 2006 and 2010 over five hundred oil rig fires broke out just in the Gulf of Mexico (Melina, Why Is Offshore Drilling So Dangerous?, livescience.com). With more of these accidents happening every year, it is shocking to see that oil companies still try to argue that these rigs are completely safe. Not only can people get hurt during these accidents but if one of the oil pipelines were to break, the damage done to the environment would be