(Wondering how frequent offshore drilling spills are? The Norwegians keep a database named SINTEF of all offshore blowouts from oil and gas exploration for the U.S., and the Norwegian and U.K. North Sea, showing that they're less frequent than they once were. Google that analysis, or go here to see some of the worst blowouts in history.)

The environmental community should give up its usual opposition to federal money for drilling research and instead try to change drilling itself. First, get more funding for research into how to safely get more oil and gas out of old wells in parts of the country that are already heavily drilled. One in six barrels of oil produced in the U.S. is from such old wells, but the feds spend only $1 million a year investigating how to increase that yield. For comparison, we spent more than $1 billion on gasoline yesterday.

Another opportunity to change the way drilling is done would be to put more money into figuring out how to extract unconventional natural gas with less water, safer drilling muds, and better fracking fluids. Instead of choking off funding, perhaps we should embark on a five-year plan with the industry to substantially reduce the environmental impact of such drilling. At the moment, such initiatives receive very little funding. (Though the EPA also has a program.)

Cynics are likely to argue that investing in oil and gas technology helps the oil industry more than the environment. But with many years of fossil fuel dependency ahead of us, we need to have higher expectations of the industry. Investing in the right kind of research is one way to establish those expectations.

Plus, the strongest argument against coal, nuclear power, and LNG terminals has been the discovery of massive amounts of "unconventional" natural gas in the U.S. over the last ten years. What made producing that gas possible? A modest $185 million investment in unconventional gas technology in the early 1980's, which was then modified by the gas industry itself over the years. But simply drilling for that gas will have huge environmental effects unless we can find ways to do it better.

Thumbnail credit: David McNew/Getty Images



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