How does your stance make sense at all? In what market does increasing supply not lead to decreasing prices?
Of course they're going to keep restricting supply to keep prices high while they can. What I don't understand is why you're here defending them without listening to the earning calls where they literally state what I am telling you
It’s super basic economics unless you control 100% of the market.
An oil provider that doubles their output from 1% of the market to 2% will only put a slight downward pressure on the price while doubling their high margin income.
The winning move is always to increase production.
> without listening to the earning calls where they literally state what I am telling you
I’m telling you that you don’t understand what they are saying. If they are unwilling to build it’s because the future of the oil is uncertain, not because the margins are high right now. The margins being high is a great reason to expand drilling even into hard to extract areas.
They don't need to build anything
They already have capacity, they have the distilleries and holding already built but sitting entirely unused, they just aren't spinning it up to purposely restrict supply and keep profit margins high. That's what we get with an oligarchy, the companies work together to control production and price.
The math is is a simple as, “why make a billion on a 500 mill investment when you can make 2 billion on 1.1 mill”? You’re suggesting they are both incompetent and not greedy, which can’t possibly be true of all of them.
You’re suggesting they are refusing to increase production out of greed, but the greedy move would be to expand drilling and refinement to capture more of the high margin volume. Preventing this defector behavior requires an explicit cartel (see OPEC), which is not legal in the US.
So your explanation for why oil companies don’t increase production is lacking.