The one immediate advantage of ramping up domestic oil production is that if the market is indeed full of speculators, as some insist, they'll be thrown into a tizzy: since they're by definition betting on the future price of oil, the possibility of an increased supply somewhere down the road will inevitably affect their bets.

And the development process, I suspect, could be sped up a bit if the NIMBY types could be mollified and/or bought off.