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I'm normally against government interference in the free market.

However, with oil, it is not a free market. OPEC controls the cost of crude.

If OPEC weren't artificially inflating the cost of crude, oil would be much less expensive until it started actually running out, then the price would rise as it became scarce and it would become cost-effective to invest in new sources.

What we have now is OPEC raising the prices to scarcity levels, but preventing any alternatives from coming on line by its ability to quickly drop prices in retaliation for any company investing in alternative sources.

Because of this environment, I would support some sort of very limited government intervention, such as an import tax to encourage domestic and alternative production, or (my preference) perhaps some level of incentives and regulatory streamlining to encourage domestic drilling - especially on public lands.

Additionally, it is pointless to do anything about crude without doing something about our limited refinery capacity.

As far as alternatives, I don't think any of them will be cost effective with the pricing situation as it is today. The turkey oaffal thing sounds interesting, but unil more specifics are released on the process, it still is an unknown. I like shale oil harvesting, but there has to be some reasonable guarantee on a return on the significant investment or it isn't worth the risk. With OPEC the way it is, you can't guarantee that a shale oil production facility will be able to produce at or below the crude price OPEC decides to set once the facility is online.

Just MHO.

OPEC, by limiting production is bringing forth supply that has before not been counted.
Actually the oil price is not so far out of line as it would seem. Gold is almost double what it was in the late nineties and the price of oil relative to gold is not so onerous. The price of gold is an accurate measure of inflation. We don't see the inflation now because we subtract the price of oil and of housing from the CPI and start talking abourt Core CPI which is the CPI without the things that are going up.The inflation is here and it is manifest in oil and housing. That's where all the extra dollars are going. If/when oil and housing decline then the prices of most everything else will rise.

OPEC has almost no influence on the price of oil, as less and less of our oil comes from OPEC countries. One turn of events this year that didn't get a lot of attention is that Canada has surpassed Saudi Arabia as the largest supplier of oil to the U.S.

And Mexico is now #3, which means two of our three largest suppliers are non-OPEC countries.