Once again Tom, I agree with you, except....

As oil executives always love to point out, oil is a commodity. No matter where it comes from, it all goes into one big virtual bathtub and then people buy it from there. This is the excuse they gave for the oil that was pumped from the Alaska North Slope. Most of it wound up in Japan, not in the US. The usual excuse: "market conditions and distribution costs".

I'm all in favor of domestic drilling, but I'd add a little wrinkle. My compromise is we explore and drill all we want in the US and its offshore waters, but we don't use the oil, it becomes part of the national reserve, still in the ground. We set up the infrastructure, but do not set it in motion. This protects our environment (exploration has much less impact than production),gives us a reserve in time of crisis, and frees us from oil blackmail by foreigners. Our enemies will use oil as a weapon, but they are too greedy to use it except as a last resort. If they know we have a year or two in reserve, it complicates their blackmail strategy.

I don't suspect we have that much oil (even the huge North Slope field was only estimated capable of meeting US demand for six months), but as long as there is oil out there in the world, and a free market for its distribution, we'd be crazy to use our own, our price would be the same as theirs, set by the free market. (Our oil won't be any cheaper than Saudi crude, the oil companies would never allow that.) And if the market is shut down by our enemies, our aircraft carriers will still have plenty of bunker fuel available to persuade them to reconsider.

Domestic production will go on sale domestically, at the going market price. It'll be gone in no time flat, the oil companies will be that much richer, and we'll be right back where we started.

A note for my Liberal friends:

You may be surprised to learn that I favor military action to secure oil.
Yes, energy is a necessity, the nation will collapse without it. We have every right to access it at the same price everyone else does. If the oil belongs to someone else, they have the right to sell it to everyone at the price set on the world market. Or they have the right to not sell it at all. It's their oil, after all. But they do not have the right to deny us the right to buy it, while continuing to sell it to everyone else. That is an act of war because it is specifically aimed at destroying us. It is the equivalent of a blockade, which is also an act of war.

This is not the same as economic sanctions, we refuse to trade with Cuba, for example (which is stupid, but that's another post) but we do not forcibly prevent Cuba from trading with others. But if Cuba needed some vital commodity only we could provide, available nowhere else, and we refused to sell it to them while selling it elsewhere, that would be an act of war.