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I said, "...convoluted way of thinking..." because your idea of saving our oil is like a man who has a thousand pounds of beef in the freezer, but goes to the grocery store to buy a couple of steaks for dinner.
I meant no disrespect. I've heard this idea before, and it doesn't make any sense to me.
If you look at our dependence on foreign oil over the last fifty years, it's obvious that it has never diminished, only increased.
We don't make it go away by saving our oil.
We have an abundance. It's time to use it.

People like the security blanket of having our Strategic Oil Reserve, even though it's been a financial boondoggle since it's inception.
Topped up, we would have enough oil in our SOR to continue life as we know it for ninety days if we cut off all foreign imports, and we are not topped up.
We are hanging out on a skinny, pecarious limb, and our politicians refuse to recognize that fact.

Definitely, the biggest obstacle facing us in becoming energy independent is the resistance of environazis to drilling in what they consider to be environmentally sensitive areas.
Are you aware that oil is self destructive?
Did you know that nature takes care of oil spills with enzymes in the oil which break it down and returns the contaminated area to it's original condition after a period of time?
Are you aware of the fact that the cleaners after the Exxon Valdez spill killed more critical life forms with the phosphates in the soap they were using to wash the birds than the oil would have killed?
I'm not trying to pin you down. I just wanted to throw those facts out for any environazis who might be lurking.

Depending on the fields in question, of course, but in some of the older fields we have depeleted the reservoirs, and the only way to generate more production is through secondary recovery methods of water or CO2 flooding, always remembering that this is a one shot deal.
Once all the recoverable oil is driven to the surrounding well bores, it's over, whereas if those same wells were allowed to produce naturally, even at a much lower rate, the oil that is by-passed with secondary recovery methods would be eventually recovered.
There is a lot of witch doctoring involved in secondary recovery. The investors want as much oil as quickly as possible creating a situation where the reservoir engineers try to walk a tight wire between making profit quickly and recovering as much oil as possible in the long run.

Although there are many opportunities for increased production through secondary recovery, our best option for becoming energy independent is to explore new areas which show promise from the seismic data, wherever they may be located.

Discussing the potential of any reservoir from seismic data is like discussing our jobless rate or the economic forecast of this country. It depends on which interpretation of the data is used.
Alaska is no different. We have the data which shows promise.
The only way we will know for sure is to drill it.

Sorry, I didn't mean to write a treatise.

You are preaching to the choir when you challenge the environmentalist. They aren't actually about saving the environment, they are about putting a lot of power in the hands of a few. It's about control, and they have discovered the easiest way to control is with fear. What could be more fearsome than suggesting the planet it going to fall apart from oil drilling, or landfills, or ozone, or name your poison of the day. To me this issue has nothing to do with the environment, it has to do with economics. If a free market dictates it makes sense to explore and drill for oil on American soil then we should be doing it. My only issue was if it was more economical to drill in the US, than to continue buying foreign oil. Apparently, it is, given the right political atmosphere.