10% of our oil comes from the Middle East, the rest comes from Canada, Mexico and Venezuela. Scouring the land and drilling everything for oil/nat gas won't do much to alter prices in the near term but just our commitment to exploration and exploitation would help to assure the market that new supply will be added in the mid to long term thus lowering volatility. The problem is I do not believe that the U.S. has its own Ghawar. Oil shale and tar sands are hugely expensive to exploit and the ROI and EROEI would be pretty high meaning oil needs to keep rising for it to be economically viable. I believe I read that exploiting the tar sands in Alberta isn't all that great for the environment either. Oh, and you need a ton of nat gas and other energy to convert the tar sands into something resembling oil.
I mean, drilling everywhere to give his some breathing room and time to build that bridge to somewhere else, wherever that may be, is a must.....but make no mistake, there isn't enough to power us or the world for cheap anymore.
Wind/Solar is not efficient, it's expensive, and costs more per KW/hr than anything else. Add to the fact that we need to buy rare earths from China to build them and it isn't a real proposition. The rare earth problem is real as China has priced out the market with slave labor. it also takes a company an avg. of 10 years to get a permit to build a mine. They are also highly subsidized and they still suck. It's a pipe dream as far as replacing mass energy production. When solar panels get to 50-75% efficiency than I will believe, but not now. As for coal and "Clean Coal" CO2 sequestering is also a pipe dream and the more "Clean Coal" you make a coal plant, the more efficiency it loses. Nothing is for free.
Short Term would be converting our commercial/civilian transport fleets to natural gas, using more natural gas to power the grid etc. This would work and work well. But it isn't being talked about a lot as it is a common sense solution.
We do not need to totally replace oil, but we need more supply and more energy diversity. Simple as that.
