Here's where we rank on oil reserves.(millions of barrels as of January 1, 2002)
The Winners
Saudi Arabia: 261,750
Canada: 180,000 (2003 data/oil sands included)
Iraq: 112,500
United Arab Emirates: 97,800
Kuwait: 96,500
Iran: 89,700
Venezuela: 77,685
The Rest
Russia: 48,573
Libya: 29,500
Mexico: 26,941
Nigeria: 24,000
China: 24,000
United States: 22,045
Qatar: 15,207
Norway: 9,947
Algeria: 9,200
Brazil: 8,465
Oman: 5,506
Kazakhstan: 5,417
Angola: 5,412
Indonesia: 5,000
ANWR would add 3 BBl to 12BBl to that figure. Neither amount get's us anywhere close to the top oil reserves in the world. Russia will still kick our bellybutton in a best case ANWR scenario.
Now, actually, in terms of sucking our reserves out of the ground as fast as we can we're doing pretty good by world standards, but we can still only meet about 1/3 of our demand. As that simple chart I posted shows, ANWR will not change that. It will not notably impact our dependence on foreign oil or the price of oil. It will not not significantly impact the price of a gallon of gasoline (especially when you add that total to the world production figure, since it will not just go as some "US surplus").
But, let's just look at the "VAST" field itself. Maximum best case, new technologies for extraction reserves = 12Billion Barrels. But perhaps only 3 billion barrels.
These fields are VAST.
Kuwait, Burgan Field = 66-72 billion
Saudi Arabia, Ghawar Field = 60-71 billion
ANWR is at best a reasonable sized field (at maximum projection possible), and hardly remarkable. There are perhaps a dozen fields that can match both ANWR and the Northern Slope combined (and those are the best we have by a good margin).
Wanna talk vast, Canada's western oil sands = WOW "1700 billion" that is still only a potential, but talk about VAST. We do have VAST shale oil, about 800 billion, but that is harder to extract than Canada's oil sands by a good margin.
As for the "other fields," US fields ANWR is by far the best it gets and that isn't all that impressive by international oil industry standards (but good for some profits, certainly). Not good for any kind of solution to our supply/demand problem though.
Charon