By Doug Cunningham

Is off-shore drilling for oil in the U.S. going to lower the price you pay for gas at the pump? Not a chance. The Center For Economic and Policy Research says if off-shore drilling is opened up as Republican presidential candidate John McCain wants to do, it will be close to a decade before the first oil can even be extracted from the currently protected off-shore sites. The Energy Information Agency says peak production from off-shore U.S. sites would be an estimated 200,000 barrels a day in twenty years' time. That’s just two tenths of a percent of projected world production and is far too small to have any significant impact on prices.