Sure, it shut down a decade ago after becoming one of the worst environmental disasters in history, but sounds feasible. Was Washington to blame for damaging the 255,600-bpd Alliance, Louisiana, refinery, following extensive damage from last year's Hurricane Ida? Shell shut another ~250k barrel refinery in 2020 (prior President) due to the pandemic. The loss in refinery capacity is from private companies making decisions for their shareholders and not because of Biden.
It might surprise you to know that a lot of work has been done on that site in the past 10 years, since you seem to have missed that. Part of it (not sure how much) is open today and they are working on the rest. Two things slow that down.
One is how much revenue the current owner is reinvesting in the plant. The other is Caribbean labor standards, which are not high, but you have to use a certain percentage of local labor if you want to get anything done. Hence my comment, which you also managed to ignore, that an infusion of government cash and engineers could move that right along.
I didn't say anything about the Alliance refinery, but it might shock you to learn that it is not the only refinery in North America. We have more than a hundred others. In fact, there are at least 5 idle refineries in the US right now that could be fired up at any time.
There's a large scale refinery that's supposed to come on line in North Dakota within the next year. The government could help that along by not dragging their feet (as usual) on inspections and permitting.
We have less because of government pressure to shut down or convert some refinery capacity to other uses. You might have read that a major Texas refinery might be shutting down ahead of schedule in the face of needed repairs, with the US Government imposed permit restrictions and increased environmental regulations, despite the US already having the strictest environmental requirements in the world for refiners. It becomes economically infeasible to repair a facility under these conditions when the federal government is publicly promising to shut down the industry. If the feds back off the rhetoric and acts more cooperatively, suddenly it becomes feasible to keep that facility producing.
Like it or not, the federal government plays a major role in the economics of domestic fuel production. They continue to throw more and more red tape at producers, and every move makes the product more expensive.
Oil and gas is highly regulated in this country, with multiple points of contact with federal, state and local government. All have an impact on the industry, but none more than the federal government, with the tightest industry regulations on the planet for oil and gas. I wrote a couple of quick summaries about the impact of the federal government on the industry
here, and
here. Enjoy.