We always hear about what a great thing it is to drill for our own oil, how having domestic oil supplies is such a good thing. There is one thing that is often overlooked in this argument. It doesn't matter whose ground the oil is under, it will still not be ours.
This is not some "we all share the earth" philosphy or anything like that. The is about business, how things work, how things are. And how things are is that the oil will always be sold to whoever wants to pay for it.
The oil companies are multinational corporations. They have no loyalty to any nation. Theoretically, they are loyal to their shareholders (and this is a whole topic in an of itself, perhaps later) but mostly they are loyal to their own entrenched management. So if an oil company pulls oil out of Saudia Arabia, or the Gulf of Mexico, or Alaska, or your back yard, it all gets dumped into that company's supply, and sold for whatever they can get for it to whoever will pay.
The price is set by a combination of supply and demand, and speculation. Traders buy and sell oil every day. Now different qualities may have different prices. The price you hear quoted in the news all the time is what they call 'light sweet crude', the easiest to refine. But where it came from? Means squat.
So the next time you hear someone saying how important it is to increase our domestic oil supply you know they are taking you for a fool, or they are ignorant themselves. In either case, they are missing the point.
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