The government eventually opened up the Naval Petroleum Reserve at Tea Pot Dome, Wyoming for development. The remaining blocks containing potential hydrocarbons offshore and in the Rocky Mtns. might be offered in the future, block by block, so as to give the American people access to hydrocarbons and better prices for the lands the oil companies who might bid to lease from the Federal government and might pay production royalties for, in addition to creating jobs, and payroll taxes. It would not be harmful to open some lands, nor in the public's interest to flood the market with leases up for bid all at once as this wouold cause the public to lose fair market value for mineral leases within its public lands.

Ah, but significant to whom? Perhaps the company with access to that oil, but that is what the motivation here is (beyond the political pandering).

Note the relative amounts of "undiscovered" oil and gas which will be "unleashed" by removing restrictions:

And, as reported by Grist

Amy Myers Jaffe, energy studies fellow at the James Baker Institute for Public Policy of Rice University, testified that the country needs to diversify its fuel sources, noting that in the '70s, the United States stopped relying on oil for electricity and home heating. The same needs to be done for automobiles, she said, which use the bulk of the oil consumed in the country today. And in order to diversify, companies are going to have to invest in research and development, she said, citing a report that found that the five largest oil companies spend very little on R&D each year -- less than half of what General Motors or Microsoft does, she said.

Myers Jaffe also rebutted the folks who are lobbying for the government to allow oil and gas drilling in new offshore areas and places like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, noting that oil companies aren't spending money on exploration in the places they're already allowed to drill.

"Now, imagine in your mind that instead of reversing those very very steep declines, the declines continue. There is a pretty good reason to think that the declines will continue as there are no particular projects going on that would reverse the declines. You will pretty clearly see that in both the cases of natural gas and crude, by the time the outer shelf production comes online, it is *not* a 7% difference, it's a *100%* difference. Simply put, it'll be the only oil and natural gas we make. I'd call that pretty bleeding significant."

Which is why the focus should not be on drilling at all. But on producing a meaningful supply of alternative energies by 2030.

The models which see little price difference from opening up all of Alaska and offshore to drilling are assuming a larger amount of oil from other sources than will be available.

First, we have the decline in oil production which will be far along by 2020.

Then we have the far bigger decline in net exports.

Combine those two and ANWR and US offshore drilling become a far larger fraction of what we'll have available in 2020-2030.