[rauljara]

You miss the point of the article. The article isn't saying that retrofitting 75,000 homes would "cancel out" the spill. The article is saying that the that would have been produced by that well could be saved by retrofitting 75,000 homes. I.e., it wouldn't have been necessary to drill that well if we had retrofitted 75,000 homes instead. Which is also a shaky argument, because proponents of oil would argue that extra oil would help to bring down the overall costs of energy, so we should drill even if we don't strictly "need" to. But I agree with the authors that investments in increased energy efficiency would be preferable to investments in oil drilling.

[dasil003]

It's even shakier than that because what does the amount of energy currently spilled have to do with anything? Presumably they have planned to extract several orders of magnitude more oil from this well than what has spilled.