Whatever oil lives below ANWR does fall under US jurisdiction, and honestly I don't know how anyone expects to price the production from any proposed oil fields. The usual 'free market' (ignoring the billions of US government subsidies for the moment) approach would be for private oil companies to bid for the concession, and extract the oil and sell it to the highest bidder. If I'm not mistaken that concession bidding has already taken place, several producers are chomping at the bit to get at ANWR. The point of my email was if you wanted to guarantee $2.50 per gallon gas for Americans, you have to price that into the concession somehow: a guarantee that the US would buy every drop of the production at $2.50 does nothing, nearly any bidder on the open market will make the same guarantee. So if you want an oil company to go to the expense of production, you need a price guarantee, and that price guarantee should be approximately how the free market for oil will value it at.

Leaving aside also whether any amount of production could guarantee $2.50 gas: the US consumes far more oil than ANWR can produce, so we have to buy more expensive oil along the way. You could incrementally lower the price of gas through additional government subsidies, or forcing the ANWR concessionaires to limit their sales for US consumption. The first I could see from the current Administration, they have proven an excellent source of free money for the oil companies, but not the second. The next Administration, maybe things swing around the other way - no subsidies, but limits on where they could sell it. (BTW when Hilary or PHRASECENSOREDPOSTERSHOULDKNOWBETTER. make some controversial decision around oil production and policy, have a heart and try to remember the catastrophic results from the current Administration's policies - those hundreds of billions were spent in your name, and from your pocket). Either way, it interferes with the vaunted operation of the free market for oil, to little or no effect.

I was going to mention the massive US military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, that can arguably be related to our nation's strategic interest in protecting a fair chunk of our chosen oil supply (Saudi), but that trillion dollar boondoggle verges on the political and I personally doubt it only has to do with protecting oil, so I'll shut up. Pretty quick the whole situation just gets me angry these days.