Fact Check: Domestic Oil & Gas Drilling Up 63%

A bit of fact-checking:

Every chance the oil industry gets, it cries to Congress about difficulty accessing domestic energy reserves. It wants to drill more oil and gas wells in the most pristine ecosystems to access oil and gas.

Just a month ago, industry executives told Congress that, instead of cutting their subsidies by $18 billion, as the House wanted to do, lawmakers should focus on helping them (i.e., handing out taxpayer money) extract more oil and gas from United States territory.

Here's how hard it's been to draw oil and gas from U.S. territory: Compared to the 1990s, the first six years of the 21st century have seen a boom in oil and gas well drilling. According to industry data quoted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of actively drilling rigs has gone up from an average of 800 to 1,300, an increase of 62.5%.

(Why the CDC was interested in the statistic: The death rates among the nation's 380,000 oil and gas rig workers increased 15% from 2003 to 2004.)

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