America as a petroleum exporter

I don't know abot you, but I was shocked to read in the Wall Street Jornal that the US was just about to become a refined petroleum products exporter.  It gets better.  With the price of crude oil skyrocketing over the past couple years, it has now become profitable to explore and extract our own vast energy resources.  That's right, our own.  Everyone always knew we had oil and natural gas, it just wasn't worth it to get it because the Middle East and a few other places had reserves that were really easy (read "cheap") to get the oil from.  So if we or anyone else started to invest in extracting the more expensive stuff, the oligopoly would just crank up production and lower the price.  Except wars erupted, nuts got nukes, reserves start to dry up and revolutions came with the spring daisies.  So now we have un-ignorable incentives to go get our own energy.  Turns out we actually have more reserves than anyone thought and it looks like the future is once again pretty bright for our energy independence.  My only question is why the current batch of bozos in Washington are wasting our money and their time on boondoggles like they gave their buddies at Solyndra instead of expiditing (not tabling) new pipelines?