ANWR: "A Drop in the Bucket"

One of the most idiotic claims currently being heard, ad nauseam, across talk radio and the right-wing blogosphere (and the McCain campaign), is that to solve the current gas price crisis, we only need to allow drilling in the Alaskan ANWR reserve, with its estimated 10-16 billion barrels of oil. Sounds good, right?

What the people making this claim are forgetting -- rather oddly for such enthusiastic free-marketeers -- is a little thing called the world market. If our oil companies were allowed to extract oil from ANWR, it would only affect prices significantly if it added significantly to the total world supply. But since these 10-16 billion barrels amount to less than 1% of total world proven reserves, there would be only a marginal rise in supply, and therefore only a marginal fall in prices. You get the same result if you look at how many barrels could be extracted per day, in relation to total world production.

But don't take it from me. Take it from George Bush's Energy Department, and a 2004 study of ANWR reported on here. Money quote:

James Kendell, one of the authors of the study, said the refuge would add to domestic production, but “when you’re talking of a world oil market of over 75 million barrels a day, adding 900,000 barrels by 2025 is a drop in the bucket.”