If oil companies slowed down their drilling, easily accounted for by decreased demand caused by a massive recession. The President had nothing to do with it.

https://rigcount.bakerhughes.com/

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/crude-oil-rigs

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fed-trump-tweets/trum...

Factor two is ESG initiatives starving the sector of financing/investors.

Factor three is other shareholders demanding cash returns after seeing tons of capex get burned the last go around.

Factor 4 is the industry turned off during Covid (didn’t get a bailout like airlines) and now has to ramp back up.

Don’t ask me to weight these but like the argument around what caused inflation it’s not one thing, but several working in concert.

Why the dramatic rise in gas prices? Two-fold - refineries were end-of-lifed during the pandemic, which reduces supply, and then the lockdowns were lifted when the Covid vaccines became widely distributed, which had the result of increasing demand. Reduced supply + increased demand = higher prices. Throw in the Ukrainian War which has introduced uncertainties in the global oil market and so you have raw material costs increasing as well.

The lockdown and implosion in demand created massive swings in demand and inventory. Crude oil production is a secondary driver, the primary driver of gas prices is end product (ie gasoline and diesel) inventory.

There isn’t a ton a competitive pressure to invest billions in capital to activate refineries when your margins are so high and competitive forces are weak.

Hubris. This is not what happened in the slightest.

Oil is traded on a global market, the little impact domestic production has on the price of oil is due to its contribution to global supplies.

The only domestic industry that has an impact on local capacity is refining.

Here is what happened: the fracking boom that began in the early/mid 2010s led to an oil glut as OPEC kept production high in order to drive out domestic US producers from the market (the shale producers had a higher cost structure and needed +$60 oil to break even). This strategy worked even before Covid, and once Covid hit, oil traded negative for a short period.

During 2021 oil inventories slowly drew down. Yet, given the experience of the latter half of the previous decade, US producers have been understandably hesitant to invest. Obviously the Biden administration did not disabuse them of this notion, but the effect of their actions is consistently overstated. Shale companies had been failing since before Biden even declared his run for president.

The war in Ukraine was then a precipitation even for oil prices to spike, but the biggest impact on gas prices has less to do with oil production challenges (though that was impacted) and more to do with refining.

Crack spreads (the difference in profit between refining a barrel of oil into gasoline vs other distillates) hit record highs this year. The value of refining diesel and jet fuel was higher than refining gasoline, when it is usually the reverse. This can be pretty clearly traced to, on the one had, a rapid rebound in air travel, and on the other, shifted supply chains from Europe where diesel is the primary fuel for passenger vehicles (though I’ll admit that the latter is more speculative on my part).

Biden announced policies related to new drilling starts but none of that impacts pricing or output to the degree you’re suggesting it does. There was no “shutting off” of production for sure so consider this a serious argumentative point?