Data

According to the Department of Energy, the U.S. uses 19,761,000 Barrels of petroleum per day. The data listed is from 2002.
USGS scientists report that between 5.9 and 13.2 billion barrels of oil are technically recoverable in the 22.5-million-acre federal lands of NPRA, with a mean value of 9.3 billion barrels Â? more than four times the mean value of the previous estimate. For the entire NPRA, including state offshore areas and Native American lands, the mean estimate is 10.4 billion barrels.

Assuming we could recover all that oil in one day (which we can't), and put it in a big container, to be tapped at will (snort); We would have enough oil to last for 528 days.
Yep, less than a year and a half.
So let's go dig up Alaska and keep those SUV's on the road!

Seriously folks, someday we will tap Alaska's oil "reserve". But 10.4 billion barrels of petroleum are not going to solve the problem. Such a marginal amount of fossil fuel won't lower what you pay at the pump.

On a side note, CNN finally decided the demand for hybrid cars was newsworthy. Toyota expects to sell 40,000 hybrids in America this year. The waiting list in St. Louis is 6 months long. In some parts of the country it's 2 years.