The American frackers don't have the flexibility which Saudi Arabia and Russia enjoys. Their rigs are located in complicated terrain, and it takes some time to either start, or to shut down the pumping of crude oil. Finding the labor force is another hassle. If they pump crude oil at full speed now, then the oil prices will crash and their revenues will take a hit.
Yes and no.
The US frackers are preparing for trumps US oil independence. Of course they wont be able to compete with the sauds, russia or iran except in the case trump will enact a tariff for importing oil - which he said he will.
Slapping an import tax on foreign oil is going to anger a lot of Americans. It isn't going to make American oil more competitive by magically reducing the cost of it. It's going to drive up the cost of oil domestically because we'll be using more domestic oil which costs more to produce. That cost will go straight to consumers. It's not a practical solution, and if he tries t he's going to find it politically untenable.
Trump never said anything like this. He said that he may impose a tariff on the imports from Mexico, including crude oil and refined products. But if such a tariff is imposed, then the American consumer will just purchase Canadian crude instead of the Mexican crude.
Just look up US oil independency and trump.
And oil tariffs are inevitable for the US oil independency because neither the US(40-50$), Canada(50++$) nor mexico(23$)can compete with opec and russia(1-10$)
You are obviously missing at least one important thing
Maybe, you miss even more (everyone is welcome to chime in on this), but to make a valid comparison between costs you should include all costs. More specifically, you forgot to include transportation (delivery) costs as well as the max volume that the cheap oil exporters can provide. Indeed, Mexico (and Venezuela, for that matter) is not very far from the US (its oil processing facilities), but as I get it, they simply can't possibly satisfy all the demand for oil in the US, so the American frackers with their expensive oil can still survive
Transportation cost is not the problem.
It is really just the difference in production cost here. Depending on compared oil fields we have a 5-50x difference.
The main thing though is that trump wants to stop imports from OPEC and non friendly states.
And without import tariffs he wont be able to do so - russian and middle east oil is just too cheap.
Edit
The world tanker fleet capacity (excluding tankers owned or chartered on long-term basis for military use by governments) was about 280 million deadweight tons in 2002. There are roughly 3,500 tankers available on the international oil transportation market. The cost of hiring a tanker is known as the charter rate. It varies according to the size and characteristics of the tanker, its origin, destination and the availability of ships, although larger ships are preferred due to the economies of scale they confer. About 435 VLCCs account for a third of the oil being carried. Transportation costs account for a small percentage of the total cost of gasoline at the pump. For instance, oil carried from the Middle East to the United States account for about 1 cent per liter at the pump. Transportation costs have conventionally accounted for between 5 to 10% of the added value of oil depending on the market being serviced. The growth in oil prices since 2000 makes the transport costs an even lower component of the total costs, sometimes lower than 5%. Demand for oil is thus not related (inelastic) to its transport costs.
Source