> This inarguably happened.
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).