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05/13/2011

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Elvis Elvisberg

We're talking about maybe a few cents per gallon in a decade or two.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2008/04/29/us-bush-oil-anwr-idUKN2934033020080429?pageNumber=2&virtualBrandChannel=0&sp=true
“We should have been exploring for oil and gas in ANWR,” he said last week when asked about record pump costs. “But, no, we made the decision and our Congress kept preventing us from opening up new areas to explore in environmentally friendly ways and now we’re becoming, as a result, more and more dependent on foreign sources of oil.”

The Energy Information Administration, which is the Energy Department’s independent analytical arm, estimated that if Congress had cleared Bush’s ANWR drilling plan the oil would have been available to refiners in 2011, but only at a small volume of 40,000 barrels a day — a drop in the bucket compared with the 20.6 million barrels the U.S. consumes daily.

At peak production, ANWR could have potentially added 780,000 barrels a day to U.S. crude oil output by 2020, according to the EIA.

The extra supplies would have cut dependence on foreign oil, but only slightly. With ANWR crude, imports would have met 60 percent of U.S. oil demand in 2020, down from 62 percent without the refuge’s supplies.

http://money.cnn.com/2011/04/25/news/economy/oil_drilling_gas_prices/index.htm
According to a 2009 study from the government’s Energy Information Administration, opening up waters that are currently closed to drilling off the East Coast, West Coast and the west coast of Florida would yield an extra 500,000 barrels a day by 2030.

The world currently consumes 89 million barrels a day, and by then would likely be using over 100 million barrels.

After OPEC got done adjusting its production to reflect the increased American output, gas prices might drop a whopping 3 cents a gallon, the study said.

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Maybe more drilling is a good idea, maybe it isn't. But the simple fact is, we don't have enough oil "to begin to wean ourselves off foreign oil." This isn't an energy policy for America, it's a boon for oil companies. Doesn't make it wrong! But that's really what we're talking about here, not energy independence.

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