The oil companies know petroleum is not under the state of Florida, except for The Jay fields of the panhandle of florida. The Destin Dome was empty. Oil companies follow a dismal science in Plate Tectonics and should scrap the entire theory. The 10% sucess rate of wildcat wells since the 1860's has not improved. Thats the only private business that is doing worse then what the United States government could do running the oil industry.

The plan to fix America's energy crisis and indeed the entire economy is here;
http://www.strategicnine.com/STERLING-AMERICAN-ENERGY-PLAN.htm

This plan outlines what we as a nation have to do to achieve a real measure of energy independence in the next 3 years. It is all up to us here in the United States - we don't have to get permission of others.

Saying that that some oil from ANWR or offshore may be exported or it wont lower gas prices is a very stupid reason for not drilling there! Take an class in economics. If we export a million barrels from ANWR and import a million barrels from somewhere else, it costs us nothing. If we import a million barrels and export none it costs us 140 million dollars! Research and development of alternative energy sources is great and we should do that, but as long as we are useing more oil than we are producing we need to drill as much as possible. If we end up with more oil than we need we can sell it to China to pay for all our imported lead painted toys!
Democrats say drilling would not help because we wont get the oil for 10 years, a great argument they have been making for a decade - jay Leno

• We know more drilling doesn’t mean lower gas prices – because we’ve already tried. The number of new offshore drilling permits has tripled since 2001 – and so have gas prices.
• In the U.S., we have less than three percent of the world’s oil. Nonetheless, a record 1.6 million barrels a day in U.S. refined petroleum products were exported during the first four months of this year, up 33 percent from 1.2 million barrels a day over the same period in 2007. The biggest share of U.S. oil products exported went to Mexico, Canada, Chile, Singapore and Brazil. Why would we be exporting all this oil, if we in fact, needed it?
Report by the US House of Representatives Committee on Natural Resources Majority Staff, June 2008.