John W. Schoen, Senior Producer, MSNBC
The week's vote in the House to approve drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge has several readers — including Kelly in Georgia — wondering if there's enough extra oil up there to make a difference.
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So let’s go with the 10.4-billion-barrel estimate. The Energy Dept. figures that, from the day final approval is granted, it would take seven to 12 years to begin producing oil. That means ANWR oil would come on stream in 2013 and peak at about 876,000 barrels per day in 2024.

How much impact will that have on oil prices? Here’s where people on both sides of the ANWR debate start to play a little mischief with the numbers.

The U.S. currently uses about 21 million barrels of oil a day, about 6 million of which is produced domestically. But that domestic production is declining as older fields dry up. So adding ANWR oil won’t bring an increase in U.S. oil production, it will barely make up for the lost production from declining fields. Nor will it make up for the increased demand of another 1.5 million barrels a day by 2013 — unless we figure out a way to conserve a lot more oil.

On the other hand, 10 billion barrels is a lot of crude. Drilling proponents say it amounts to something like 20 years worth of imports from Saudi Arabia. (While that sounds pretty good, it overlooks the fact that only about 10 percent of U.S. oil imports come from Saudi Arabia.) If all 10 billion barrels were recovered, at 1 million barrels a day, production would last for 27 years. But that's not likely.

In any case, drilling in ANWR isn’t likely to make much of a dent on the cost of crude. With global demand of some 85 million barrels a day — and rising — even an extra 1 million barrels a day wouldn't be enough to have a significant long-term impact on prices. Assuming global demand continues to grow by 2 percent a year, a million barrels a day will represent about 1 percent of overall demand by 2013.
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