If America was to produce it’s own oil, yes it would be sold at the international market price, which would then drop do to an increase in supply.
It would also go a long way to stabilize the oil markets prices since one little utterance from a Middle Eastern dictator wouldn’t cause massive spikes, we would essentially remove almost all volatility from the market.
I completely agree that it would drop international oil prices, but as someone earlier mentioned, we’re only really competitive if oil is expensive enough to tap things like oil shale.
We’re kind of in a sticky situation. If oil is >$100/barrel, we could probably become energy independent, but if oil gets that high, it sufficiently depresses economic activity to the point where oil gets way cheaper than that. The US will probably never be energy independent if a) we *don’t* have government subsidized/nationalized oil infrastructure AND b)the price stays under ~$75/barrel or so. It seems kind of like a catch-22 =(