Bull!!There is between 8-30 billion barrels of oil there.
I an SOOO sick and TIRED of this LIE that keeps being pushed around by the environmental KOOKS.
Having said that, it really doesn't make any difference what percentage of annual American usage that oil represents. What's important is what percentage of annual world oil production it is. Because oil is a world commodity. Oil produced from the ANWR will go on the world market. Even if it was reserved for the American market only, it's still going to be priced according to the world oil market. The percentage the ANWR oil drives down gas prices will be a function of how much it increases the world's gas supply, not the American gas supply. And this also presumes that the other oil-producing nations don't change how much oil they are pumping to keep prices up.
From the link above, there's apparently a reasonable estimate that the maximum likely production of ANWR is 1.8 million barrels of oil a day. The EIA estimates world demand is going to be 86 million barrels a day. So we're looking at about a 2% increase in world oil, and that's apparently with OPEC pumping as much oil as it can. From all that, plus other factors (China and India increasing their consumption), it seems to me that putting ANWR online will, for about 15 years, slow down the increase of gas prices slightly (maybe 2 cents on the dollar), but won't stop the rise and certainly won't cause a drop.
Whether that's worth any environmental damage to the ANWR is debatable. Maybe the best thing to do is to drill for the oil but not extract it, using it as a strategic reserve should the shit really hit the fan in the Middle East.