Why does it take 10 years for a hole, that we can drill in a few days, to produce oil?

Question

Why does it take 10 years for a hole, that we can drill in a few days, to produce oil?

Answer 1

It doesn't, it might take 10 years to drill and produce oil from off-shore drilling.  

Answer 2

Partly due to how slow the government is to process anything, including requests for drilling approval.  Also somewhat due to needing to often so a fair amount of exploration drilling to find the oil.  They can either guess and drill for exploration or also do sort of testing first first takes time. For off-shore, they need to build everything then float it out to the location which I'm sure takes a while.

It shouldn't take 10 years though. Drilling technology is much better today.