The nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve was created in 1975 after the Arab oil embargo caused fear and angry gas-station lines across the country. The underground reservoirs, believed to be the world’s largest, were intended as an emergency oil-savings account for an actual energy crisis threatening national security.
The SPR was not intended for a political crisis when Joe Biden’s Democrats face midterm election annihilation over inflation and outrageous gasoline prices above $6 a gallon caused by the same president’s ideological war on fossil fuels.
Biden’s announced “plan,” which drew considerable criticism, is to draw down a million barrels a day for 180 days from the country’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve stored in vast underground salt caverns in Texas and Louisiana.
Since each barrel contains enough oil to produce 44 gallons of petroleum products, that’s a lot of fossil fuel flowing into the market.
It turns out that, contrary to all of the Biden Administration hype regarding easing gasoline prices for his countrymen it is not Americans who are directly benefiting from the use up American reserves.
No, Biden’s Energy Department has sold millions of barrels of oil to the same energy companies the president has been loudly denouncing for making excess profits off gasoline sales.
Many of the crude oil from SPR has been sucked out of these reservoirs and is being transferred to giant oil tankers, which are en route from U.S. resources to higher international prices.
It’s a hopeful bank shot by Joe Biden’s less-than-market-savvy administration that more oil on international markets will lower the prices American suppliers must pay for oil on those same markets to haul back and refine for American voters…I mean, for American drivers.
They’re the folks who often find their debit-card purchases maxing out daily withdrawal limits after pumping a single tank of gas.
Joe Biden is Joe Biden. He takes no responsibility whatsoever for the US’s oil production being cut or rampant inflation through trillions of dollars in new spending.
Vladimir Putin is the sole reason for oil’s recent price rise. His unprovoked February invasion in Ukraine and uncertain outcome in Moscow has spooked international energy markets. Prices for barrels then jumped from $90 up to $120. They’ve since eased somewhat.
Just 532 days ago — Donald Trump’s last hours in office — such price explosions would not have mattered much because under his policies and de-regulations, for the first time in a long while the United States had become energy independent.
In fact, America was actually producing enough energy in its own country that they were exporting huge quantities at high prices.
Joe Biden started to demolish that independence the day he was told to place himself in Oval Office. The Keystone XL pipeline and its 40,000 workers, which would have delivered safe 840,000 barrels each day of Canadian oil from Alberta through Texas, was killed by Joe Biden.
Biden repeated his campaign pledge to end the U.S. oil industry, which has thousands of jobs.
It was inevitable that less oil would be produced in America now and into the future. This led to increased imports from abroad, at greater prices. Gas prices averaged at $2.11 per gallon when Biden was elected. The average gas price in the country was $2.11 per gallon. They were $5.00 last month.
For a time, the United States was still buying 740,000 barrels of Russian oil every day, even after Putin’s troops were shelling Ukraine’s cities and towns.
Biden had to cancel the embargos because of domestic political pressures. He also led an alliance embargo on Russian oil and gasoline purchases, which Biden claimed would prevent Putin from generating billions to pay for his invasion.
Alas, in another of those unintended consequences that always seem to surprise professional politicians like Biden, the U.S. president’s embargo sent oil prices surging even higher.
The result, as we detailed here, was numerous new customers who don’t care about Ukraine and are willing to pay the higher prices, sending billions in new revenues into Putin’s treasury for as much energy production as he can deliver.
Biden’s energy plan was to smother the U.S. fossil fuel industry and its thousands of jobs and force Americans to go green, to abandon their internal-combustion engines and buy electric ones that start at $55,000.
These vehicles will be powered by batteries that are charged from the overburdened coal-fired generator stations. Power companies asking customers for energy savings on hot summer afternoons in order to prevent brown-outs.
This half-baked thinking is reminiscent of Biden’s disastrous Afghan withdrawal plans and his empty design to fight inflation most recently at an 8.6 percent annual rate. This seems to be logical in Biden’s 80-year old brain, and those of his dedicated left-leaning aides.
However, oil reserves are falling. They now account for 86 percent, or 714million barrels, of their petroleum capacity. Trump took advantage of low oil prices to refill the caverns.
Other presidents have authorized releases from the SPR, but none as huge as Biden’s 180-million barrel draw-down set to run right up to – Oh, look! – the November election month.
George W. Bush in 2005 approved the release of oil after Hurricane Katrina. In 2011, Barack Obama okayed the use of 11 million barrels to ease market disruption caused by the war that the Nobel Peace Prize winner helped initiate against Libya’s Moammar Gaddhafi.
Biden Energy officials claim they will refill just one-third the drawdown by the end of next year, when they expect, with the certainty of bureaucrats that oil prices to be lower.
Next week, as part of his continuing charade to appear to be helping American car owners, the four engines on Biden’s 747 will burn 12.5 hours of fossil fuel to take him to Saudi Arabia, a kingdom he dubbed a “pariah” during his two- and three-hour-long campaign days in 2020.
Biden said that he believes some of the things he says, but that a higher Saudi oil production will not lead to lower prices. Key word there: “main.” OPEC already snubbed a previous Biden plea. Joe Biden simply wants to know how the desert sand compares with his Delaware beach sand.
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