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officials have a different constituency and responsibility (e.g. help defeat a global threat...Putin)...right now, the O&G industry is on the horns of a dilemma...they realize that their future growth is being "capped" (i.e. Climate Change) and they want to gain/keep every nickel they can put their hands on...pitching in to help a President who is synonymous with that outcome doesn't resonate very well...so here we are...looks like Joe's got some tough decisions to make.

Here are some excerpts from the attached link regarding this issue...a month old, but still quite relevant...
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"A major factor holding back U.S crude production, according to industry analysts, is the attitude of the smaller energy firms, which contribute to a sizable portion of total output. “We are not adding any growth capital due to higher prices: we are staying disciplined,” Lee Tillman, the chief executive of Marathon, told Wall Street analysts last week. Scott Sheffield, the C.E.O. of Pioneer, has been even more explicit. “Whether it’s a hundred-and-fifty-dollar oil, two-hundred-dollar oil, or a hundred-dollar oil, we’re not going to change our growth plans,” he said in February. In an earnings call with Wall Street analysts last week, Sheffield reiterated that Pioneer would cap its growth at five per cent this year and next year.

This refusal to add substantial new production capacity has infuriated many people in the Administration, including Biden. “They don’t want to increase supply because Putin’s price hike means higher profits,” he remarked in a recent speech. The President is certainly on to something, but the problem isn’t merely one of greedy C.E.O.s. In calling on oil producers to act patriotically, the White House is confronting an entire industry that is now operating according to the strict logic of shareholder capitalism—a logic that has no place for modest profits, angry S.U.V. owners, or rallying around Ukraine."...
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"In a recent survey of executives at more than a hundred oil and gas firms, carried out by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, nearly sixty per cent of respondents said that the “investor pressure to maintain capital discipline” was the primary factor holding back the growth of production. Given this pressure from Wall Street, many energy executives, particularly those at smaller firms, are perfectly willing to defy the White House. With their far-flung global operations, the Big Oil executives know that, at any moment, they may need to call upon the U.S. government to protect their assets or resolve disputes with host countries. The domestic producers don’t have this concern, and the White House has less leverage over them as a result."...
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The response from energy C.E.O.s would surely be that they are paid to boost their companies’ profits and increase their share prices, not placate voters. That’s how corporate capitalism works these days, but, as the historian Karl Polanyi pointed out many decades ago, a market economy can be sustained only if it is embedded in a broader social and political settlement. Profiteering, especially in wartime, corrodes any such compact. Under the windfall-tax proposal from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, of Rhode Island, and Representative Ro Khanna, of California, oil companies would pay a tax determined by the difference between the current oil price and the pre-pandemic one. To give the oil C.E.O.s another push, Biden should throw his support behind this proposal.


Link: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/as-gas-prices-reach-new-highs-oil-companies-are-profiteering