| Re: What if gas cost $10 a gallon?
We'd be drilling our own oil by that point. The reason why we don't drill more of our oil right now, aside from environmental protection groups, is because through most of the late '80s, all of the '90s, and the early part of this decade it was less expensive to just buy the oil from OPEC than to drill it ourselves (thus why pretty much all of the oil fields in southern Illinois were shut down and capped in the '80s). It makes no financial sense to drill your own oil when you can buy it cheaper than it costs to extract it. However, with gas going well over $100/gal, if we haven't reached the point yet where OPEC's price exceeds the cost of drilling our own oil, then we are quickly reaching it. It's hard to say whether OPEC really even cares about whether we're drilling our own oil now as China has become such a huge consumer and it appears they'll pay almost any price for it, but that becomes yet another reason to drill our own oil - we can sell our excess to China at a high price and, hopefully, increase national income.
| 
