Fair gripe about the source of your beliefs, I have no idea where they actually came from. On the other hand you started this discussion basically calling me ignorant, so I don't feel too bad about a little return snark;)
I doubt that you ever thought we were talking about nat gas. My comment was very specific, discussing crude oil and no other product. In like fashion, you have no idea what I know about the oil industry.
Increasing production is NOT the only way to drop prices. The more sane way is to cut demand, an even better control would be to smoke the speculators out of the market. As an expert in the oil industry you certainly are familiar with the long period of relative price stability before the pandemic, where
the price hovered around $70 a barrel. you certainly are aware of the crash in those prices, and I hope you understand the way that futures market speculators bid up futures prices in the anticipation of supply restrictions. Non use "investors" buy over half of all futures contracts, specifically to profit from their resale, and local oil markets make their prices from those set by global speculative players.
My city is a prime example. Both crude production and gas refining are local, the crude is high wax content and difficult both to ship and to refine. Demand is relatively inelastic, and as guaranteed as any conceivable market.
If the crude that supplies our gas refiners was truly fungible, as cheap nearly a thousand miles away in the nearest alternative market after shipping it there in heated trucks, if those refineries were equipped to readily accept this divergent product along with their normal product, then "our" crude might honestly be seen as a global product. None of these cases are true.
Production has not yet appreciably increased domestically, it hovers today around the same level as it did in early '18. There's little restriction in the small sector of domestic production that comes from public lands, about 7% of the total, and of course increasing that total by ten or twenty percent through crash development of new leases would still only increase global production by maybe a million barrels, and you've already seen the impact that a million barrels a day from the strategic reserve has had on prices.
You can't have it both ways, either oil prices are fixed in a global market and marginal changes in U.S. production have marginal effects, or oil prices are local and local markets should make those prices.
