$3.75

[Flopper]

Which is why we should've started drilling in ANWAR and other places a long time ago so we'd be energy independent by now.

It is the supply vs. demand international that determines the price of oil in the US. Much of the huge oil production from Alaska is going to Japan and other far eastern states, while Alaska suffers from some of the highest gas prices in the nation. As long as oil can be freely traded across borders, energy independence does not guarantee low gas prices.

Oil is not traded freely across borders though, is it? OPEC? The guys that set the price to whatever they want it to be and control the supply? You really think foreign oil from the middle east is cheaper than domestic, after you add in the shipping costs?

What guarantees low gas prices is greater supply, regardless of where it comes from, but if we harvest our own we are not subject to vagaries of our enemies.

By freely traded, I mean we don't restrict imports or exports with quotas or tariffs. Like many markets, oil is subject to manipulation which OPEC certainly does.

Many people assume that transportation cost of oil is high enough to make foreign oil much more expensive than domestic, but that is not the case. The average cost of oil transport by tanker amounts to only two or three United States cents per 1 US gallon.

Oil tanker - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Of course there is a huge amount of oil waiting to be developed in the US, but that will not happened as long as Arab states can supply 1/3 of the world's oil needs at a production cost of only one or two dollars/barrel.

The bottom line is that if the federal government were to allow oil companies to lease every acre of environmental sensitive land in the country, it would not have a major impact on gas prices and they would continue to rise.