There is an alternative to drilling domestically.
Put a few of the technologies we already have on line, like Thermal Depolymerization of organic wastes in our daily stream of trash. The science is there, the need is there, and technology is sufficiently sophisticated to be applied to a wide range of organic materials, like sewage sludge, demolition of frame houses, cleanup of street trash, old tires, and even lawn clippings that have a nasty habit of ending up in land fills.
Or an even more high-tech method of eliminating ALL kinds of trash and waste, called plasma trash reduction.
www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2007-03/prophet-garbage
a quite elegant way of breaking down and reclaiming the most troublesome of trash accumulations.
There are three by-products from this method of trash reduction, one of which is syngas, a mixture of carbon monoxide and free hydrogen, a second one of which is heat, and a third one of which is the slag.
The principle is to fire up a plasma arc, and feed ground-up trash of ANY composition through this arc. The arc, which is about 33,000 degrees F. at its heart, is about three times hotter than the surface of the sun. Any organic materical is reduced, through the Fischer-Tropsch process, and the non-organic material is molten, dropping to the base of the retort, where it is tapped off, like the slag from an iron smelter. This slag is in some cases an excellent ore, and may be used for the reclamation of various elements, like most metals and a number of non-metallic elements. When the more valuable elements are extracted, the remaining material, mostly silicates in some form, are available for use as aggregate for the making of concrete or as a base in roadbuilding.
The free hydrogen may be separated from the carbon monoxide (after these two gases have given up most of their heat energy through heat exchangers, which are used to drive steam power generation plants), and used in constructing the hydrogen fuel distribution system. The carbon monoxide, an excellent fuel in its own right, is further reburned to drive additional power generation units. All this electricity generated by this system is way more than adequate to keep the plasma arc lit up and continuously firing, and in fact, by careful attention to the engineering, it is possible to produce about three times as much electrical power as is consumed in the plasma arc.
These things cost about a quarter billion dollars a copy, but with about nine such units, New York City would not have to import one bit of electrical energy from outside their grid supply, and not export one bit of trash to landfills elsewhere, which may be at distances of several hundred miles.
The City of Tomorrow is within our reach. Clean, self-sufficient, and not imposing an economic burden on the surrounding environment.
If it takes $100 a barrel oil to make it happen, let the price rise to $200 a barrel, and it happens twice as fast.