What kind of ecological damage does oil drilling do to the land?

Question

I grew up in Lima, Ohio, and in the decades before I was born, was told the whole area was once covered with oil fields... Now, aside from the area basically lacking subtle qualities of nature you'd hardly notice they were oil fields...

I noticed the area is pretty well worked over, and subtle things like no wild garlic or other plants are lacking..It IS sort of a damage if you see it in that way, but for the average suburbanite with a job it hardly matters

Answer 1

No damage at all. Oil drilling has come a long way since way back then. One of the biggest problems today is convincing some people of this.

Answer 2

As you can see from the area you are in, oil drilling leaves very little, if any, permanent scars on the land.  And, modern day drilling is thousands of times "greener" than was the drilling you mentioned.

Answer 3

20 or 30 years ago drilling was the only priority, companies didn't care about the area around the well. But with today's spotlight on ecology companies have found greener ways to drill and to keep the area relatively pristeen. The amount of ecological damage to plant and wildlife in Alaska for example would be minimal.

Answer 4

My fear about draining oil from the earth is that we're doing something irreversible yet have no idea why the oil is even there.  Nature abhors a vacuum - so why is it there?  does it act like a lubricant for the plates?  Does it cushion the plates?  I don't know about anyone else but it scares the bejeezus out of me.

Answer 5

In the old days when people dumped stuff everywhere ... could be significant.

Nowadays there are oil wells where nobody would expect them, like near a mall.  See:

http://www.canada.com/edmontonjournal/ne...

So despite all the hype from tree-huggers, drilling doesn't have to be any worse than any other industrial activity.