Peering through the fog of my memory I remember something mentioned about this in Econ 101, or was it Real Life 302...:)
The fact of the matter is that if the price of a commodity reaches the point where it is prohibitive for the masses to consume the commodity, they will reduce their consumption, thereby reducing demand, thereby reducing the price of the commodity.
At the same time, the high price of the commodity encourages speculators to find more of it to sell at the high price. Greater supply + Lower Demand = Lower Price.
Simulaneously, the prohibitively high price of the commodity encourages the entrepreneur to invent/develop an alternative to the high priced commodity which performs the same function but at a lower price shifting demand to the alternative commodity. Lower Demand = Lower Price.
These forces are currently at work on the price of crude oil/gasoline. IF the price stays up long enough for speculators to find more supply and/or entrepreneurs to successfully develop alternatives to gasoline, the price of crude oil and gas could plummet.
On the other hand...I could be wrong.
Which explains why OPEC and the Oil Industry act in unison as a
cartel: A formal agreement between businesses in the same industry, usually on an international scale, to get market control, raise the market price, and otherwise act like a monopoly. A cartel tends to be unstable because the artificially high prices it sets gives each member of the cartel an incentive to "cheat" with a slightly lower price. When only one member of the cartel lowers the price, it can make oodles of profit by taking customers away from the other members. If they all cheat, the cartel falls apart. While cartels damage efficiency, they're power is often short-lived because of this cheating. Like collusion and other techniques of market control, cartels are illegal in the United States.
Since cartels are illegal within the US, the industry naturally prefers to import oil as "free trade" rather than exand utilization of our own resources.