The only reason we pull oil from that Godforsaken part of the world is so we can sell them weapons and get our money back.
Heck oh mighty, (oh, excuse my french) we still celebrate Columbus day because he was willing to risk his life falling off the edge of the 'erf, just so he wouldn't have to deal with the mid-east devils.
Let’s keep in mind here that NPR-A has already been determined to be largely empty and so this is somewhat silly. As you can see here:
2002 — “The assessment estimates (Table 1) that there is between 5.9 and 13.2 billion barrels of oil (BBO) of technically recoverable oil and between 39.1 and 83.2 trillion cubic feet (TCF) of natural gas on federal lands within NRPA.”
In January last year, after exploratory drilling was completed in the most promising locales based on seismic studies, the USGS released this assessment:
2010: An assessment by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) in 2010 estimated that the amount of oil yet to be discovered in the NPRA is only one-tenth of what was believed to be there in the previous assessment, completed in 2002.[2]
The new USGS estimate now says the NPRA contained approximately “896 million barrels of conventional, undiscovered oil”.[2] The reason for the decrease is because of new exploratory drilling, which showed that many areas that were believed to hold oil actually hold natural gas.
The estimates of the amount of undiscovered natural gas in the region also fell, from “61 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered, conventional, non-associated gas” in the 2002 estimate, to 53 trillion cubic feet in the 2010 estimate.
This is a gas field, not an oil field.
896 million barrels is worth going after, but a field like that is only going to do maybe 50,000 barrels/day. That doesn’t come close to offsetting the plummet in Prudhoe Bay’s production, which was multiple million barrels/day at one point and is now down to just 600K bpd, and falling relentlessly every year as the field dies/goes empty.