Sort of yes. According to more leftward sources not all currently allowed drilling permits are being exploited because the oil companies, or more specifically their investors, took a bath towards the end of the shale boom and during Covid. They're being slow to expand production specifically to keep prices up and recoup their losses. I haven't confirmed this myself but it sounds perfectly plausible.
This doesn't change the many, many other things the Biden administration has done to chill oil production, such as killing keystone, putting Green activists into the important administratorial slots that oversee all of this, and making grand signals about reducing drilling. That second one is really important since democrats have mastered the art of acting reasonable on the political stage while using goons in the deep state and fourth estate to do the dirty work work outside of the limelight. Anyone who's had the pleasure of working with the Bureau of Land Management knows the playbook at this point.
His stunts with Saudi Arabia and Venezuela are also a joke. Even if Venezuela was a useful oil exporter, which its not since they exclusively produce tar oil and not very much of it now after the economic collapse, going hat in hand to Maduro is not even a short term good idea. And of course the Saudis have been shitstains for decades and really need to be cut loose. They stopped being worth it a long time ago.
Energy independence is a pretty easy formula and even goes a long way to compromise with the greens. A base of nuclear electricity, supplemented by renewables where available, and then with the meat of variating production filled in by preferably natural gas, with oil and coal where necessary. That right there is an actual infrastructure boondoggle that would be worth the pile of increasingly worthless monopoly money we'd spend on it.
