It's a rather charming social thing we humans do to treat countries as big collective individuals. We project on them things we would never project onto our friends, like the ability to take care of all their own material needs in the age of specialization and trade. Your analogy to a household making its own butter though they have access to better butter made by more skilled producers and imported into the "household" known as the US makes clear how our economic intuitions can mislead us, given a bit of poetic license and a dash of social-psychological priming. Let's unpack this further.
Not all oil is equal in a world with global just-in-time value chains with intricate divisions of labor. Oil is but one node in this larger structure. We have heard this same song before. One can't make jet fuel out of just any old crude you find under the Permian basin or your front yard. With the light-sweet being the "grade A" resource that comes at a premium, your point about "not all oil being the same" highlights the fact that in our late-modern socioeconomic organization it makes more sense for the US to focus on what it is better at than attempting crude self-sufficiency at any cost. And just what is the US the world champion at if not the heavy-sour crude type? One wonders! The irony of being the number 1 producer globally while at the same time importing so much does put some cracks into the idea of national exceptionalism! Your point about refineries and the costs incurred from optimizing them towards a different type of crude and all of the environmental and economic implications brings the matter down to earth, reminding us to look closely before resorting to rhetoric. Your article is a wonderful exposition of this seemingly obvious and easy question few people ask - or rather are bold enough to make explicit. Let's do away with our illusions that individuals or groups, like "countries", can or even should always produce all of their own needs on their own.
Are we not free to decide which needs are to be fulfilled externally through trade and exchange and which needs must be produced domestically? It is by making conscious choices rather than clinging to outdated assumptions that we embrace authenticity and responsibility for the shaping of our individual and collective destinies in the face of complexity.
