Fewer than 10% of those wells were 'dry' holes (economically infeasible).
At any given time there are roughly 2200 rigs drilling in the world, and drill rates have increased phenomenally since I started (wells which used to take 5 months to drill now take 6 weeks or less.)
While blowouts make spectacular news footage, so do school slaughters.
Similarly, the vast number of oil wells are drilled with nothing approaching a blowout, just like millions of children going to school daily, more endangered by the curriculum or the contents of their lunch than a lunatic gunman.
Unfortunately, both accidents and lunatics have a tremendous media impact. Both are usually aimed at the wrong people.
Most of the oil well fires in the last two decades were deliberately set (Kuwait), and those were extinguished far faster than anyone initially thought possible.
While the industry has always been safety concious to some degree, the last twenty years have seen sweeping changes in safety programs which actively do post-accident analysis and take preventive measures to prevent recurrences.
When no two wells are exactly the same, even in the same field, there are nearly infinite oportunities for problems or improvement, but the major problems have been mostly covered. The remainder has been the continuing education of highly capable personnel and an enhanced sense of professionalism on the part of rig crews.
Gone are the days of "wooden derricks and iron men", replaced by highly efficient and educated personnel, computer monitoring systems, and very well developed blowout prevention science applied onsite to catch situations long before they become critical.
Drilling has become far safer than it was when I started in the oil patch, because it is clearly economically advantageous to not burn down multimillion dollar oil rigs and kill off the hired help. Good hands take time to train.
As for people not being able to drive the boat, or some nitwit digging a hole through a well marked pipeline, the oil drilling industry gets blamed for what are essentially transportation accidents. When you consider the millions of barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas transported daily in the US, the safety record is far more impressive than that of people driving their kids home from school.
That said, sure, accidents have brought pressure on the industry, but there really are no instances in this day and age where it is not economically advantageous to get it right, environmentally speaking. A load of oil delivered has profit potential, one spilled is a huge liability. Although public pressure has helped enhance awareness in the industry, the fact remains that no credit is given by the environmental groups or the MSM for progress along safety or environmental lines. Ironically, most of the crews working on domestic land rigs live somewhere near the wellsite, and have an interest in not soiling thier own back yard.
There exist a substantially vocal group, though, for whom good is never enough, whose raison d'etre is to prevent any drilling, either from NIMBY or alleged environmental concerns. Some of the hype they muster is similar to the Brady Bunch in re firearms. (Overblown, overplayed, and overhyped.)
When you consider all the 'extra' oil I have found in my career that clients did not anticipate (several million barrels) only adds up to lighting the East Coast for a few weeks, (if that), it might put things in perspective as to just how much oil is moving around out there.
When there is a transportation accident, it tends to be big, even though it is just a drop in the proverbial bucket. I am not making excuses, because I wouldn't want a tanker load of crude washing up on my beach either, just saying the safety record is actually pretty darned good.
Note, too that lately there has been a trend to label anything 'eeevil' as "Big" --Big Oil, Big Tobacco, Big everything but Smiling Enzyte Bob is supposed to be 'eeeevil'.
While there are numerous smaller oil companies, we never hear about the evils of 'small' oil...