Oil companies can't do much with oil if they have chosen to close down a number of refineries and have also not made much real noise about building new ones.
From a few years ago:
"Three separate internal confidential memos from Mobil, Chevron and Texaco have been obtained by The Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights."
"These memos outline a deliberate agenda to gouge prices and create artificial scarcity by limiting capacities of and outright closing oil refineries. This was a nationwide lobbying effort led by the American Petroleum Institute to encourage refineries to do this."
"An internal Chevron memo states; "A senior energy analyst at the recent API convention warned that if the US petroleum industry doesn't reduce its refining capacity it will never see any substantial increase in refinery margins.""
"The Memos make clear that blockages in refining capacity and opening new refineries did not come from environmental organizations, as the oil industry claimed, but via a deliberate policy of limitation and price gouging at the behest of the oil industry itself."
Secondly, it does not serve their profit line to produce great amounts of oil.
Or, even if oil is generated in this way, how we are not currently burning more than the earth produces?
I really don't understand that sentence.
Limiting refining capacity and the slow but steady emptying of oil fields are, for me, two completely different things. Perhaps you can clarify how they are one and the same. And why the US hit a peak of oil production and is now producing less.
Surely American oil companies would rather get the oil out of US territory than going to more dangerous places.