We need to increase our domestic oil production and lessen our reliance on dangerous foreign sources. Energy conservation alone doesn’t solve our energy needs; it just postpones it for a short while. Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would help since it would be one of the largest oil fields discovered in the world in the last 40 years.

What’s being proposed is to open only a small fraction, only 8 percent of the refuge, for exploration. All exploration areas are not drilled in. Technologies like horizontal drilling, three-dimensional seismic mapping and ice roads minimize the drilling footprint to only 2,000 acres out of the 19 million acres of the ANWR, or one ten-thousandth of one percent.

This region is a treeless arctic desert with almost no wildlife during its nine month winters. Oil and gas development has successfully co-existed with wildlife in Alaska’s arctic for more than 30 years. The Central Arctic Caribou herd at Prudhoe Bay has grown from 3,000 in 1970 to more than 27,000 today; a 900 percent increase. The population of grizzly bears and polar bears has also increased. Oil development will not endanger any species.

America needs to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Kim Rogalin, Naperville