Brilliant!

I can't recall if I mentioned this or not, but I've talked about this with people in conversations. If supply is what's keeping oil prices high, then drilling will eventually increase supply, and decrease prices. If speculation is keeping oil prices high (which it is, in part, but I believe as an effect of growing demand and static supply) then opening up reserves to drilling in the US will result in the POTENTIAL for increased supplies, which will cause speculators to lower their speculative prices.

However, there is reason to believe that opening up reserves to drilling in the US will ALSO increase supply.

http://mises.org/story/3047

The logic is simple. If prices are expected to continue to rise, OPEC has an incentive to sit on as much oil as they can in order to sell it at a higher price next year. American companies have a hard time doing this because they aren't able to effectively collude (at least not legally). If, however, the US opens it's reserves, then OPEC has an incentive to sell more oil at todays prices before the US opens up.