Do you honestly think the price of gas at the pump would drop significantly if, e.g., the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge were opened to drilling?! Compared to our annual national consumption, there really ain’t much there. Nor anywhere else – save possibly Iraq, where drilling has been artificially limited as a matter of OPEC policy and oil-companies policy since WWI. And since Iraq remains a member of OPEC . . .
The Department of Energy estimated that opening ANWR to drilling would reduce the price of a barrel of oil by about $1.44 by 2027. And that comes with a rather dramatic caveat: “Assuming that world oil markets continue to work as they do today, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) could neutralize any potential price impact of ANWR oil production by reducing its oil exports by an equal amount.”
There’s no way to drill our way out of high gas prices. We’d need 50 ANWRs to reduce gas prices to a level that Americans have become accustomed to, and that’s just not possible.