A Sneaky Way To End Fossil Fuel
When candidate Joe Biden promised while on the campaign trail that “we’re going to end fossil fuel,” could anyone have guessed that emptying the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve was part of the plan? Maybe Biden had that in mind all along – enact policies that raise the price of gasoline, dip into the reserves to lower prices for consumers, then finally wring them dry for, putatively, the same reason. That’s one way to get rid of quite a lot of fossil fuel.
The federal Strategic Petroleum Reserve is “the world’s largest supply of emergency crude oil,” says the Energy Department. It was created in 1975 by the Energy Conservation Act, “primarily to reduce the impact of disruptions in supplies of petroleum products and to carry out obligations of the United States under the international energy program.” The oil is stored in underground salt caverns at four sites along the Gulf Coast. Initially planned to hold up to 1 billion barrels of petroleum, the authorized storage capacity, at 714 million barrels, is a bit short of that. Still, says the Energy Department, this “makes it a significant deterrent to oil import cutoffs and a key tool in foreign policy.”
The SPR was never intended to be a political chip, to be tapped into by a president who wants to temporarily push down gasoline prices to gain votes.
Nor was it to be used as a means to end fossil fuels, a Democratic Party dream that would be a long national nightmare for the country.
The Biden administration has authorized two releases from the country’s petroleum reserves. Last week it announced the sale and liquidation of 1 million barrels from the Northeast Gasoline Supply Reserve, established after 2012’s Hurricane Sandy damaged refineries and terminals, and left “some New York gas stations without fuel for as long as 30 days.” The Energy Department says this “solicitation is strategically timed and structured to maximize its impact on gasoline prices, helping to lower prices at the pump as Americans hit the road this summer.”
Given that Northeast Gasoline Supply Reserve has a capacity of only 1 million barrels over two sites, this release will kill the inventory.
Two years ago, with reserves already falling (see chart below), the administration announced it would release 180 million barrels of crude oil from the SPR “to address the significant global supply disruption caused by Putin’s war on Ukraine, act as a wartime bridge for domestic production to increase, and aid in lowering energy costs for American families.”
So two questions: Will Biden continue to unload the nation’s emergency supplies to try to hold prices down and increase his chances to win this fall? Will he replace the stocks that he’s depleted?
In April, with the SPR down to 363.6 million barrels of oil, a 43% plunge from when Biden took office, the administration canceled the plan it had announced in March to buy up to 3 million barrels of oil that would go toward replenishing what had been taken out of the SPR. Why? Because prices were too high.
Shortly after the White House backed off the purchase, Power The Future, an energy research organization, complained that “Biden has spent most of his presidency” releasing oil from federal reserves, and had “in fact … drained the SPR more than any other president in history.”
Daniel Turner, Power The Future founder and executive director, said it was done “for political reasons,” to “cut our domestic production for his climate agenda.”
But then a couple of weeks ago, the administration said it had awarded contracts to purchase “3.3 million barrels of U.S.-produced crude oil for the” SPR, and bragged about it. Not that it’s worth bragging about. The buyback won’t move the fuel gauge needle, and neither will future purchases. Shale Magazine editor in chief Robert Rapier believes “administration won’t replace more than 10% of the oil removed from the SPR since Biden was inaugurated.”
Now back to the questions posed above. The answer to the first is: Don’t be surprised if Biden is playing politics with energy. He’s already made it clear that buying votes is part of his reelection strategy.
The answer to the second question is: He will make a show of doing so, but there will be no sincerity behind it. Biden, and the hard left Democratic Party that props him up and is run by Barack Obama, are committed to eliminating fossil fuels, and draining federally owned reserves could be a key part of that scheme.
It would be a mistake, but the Democrats will see it as a feature. After all, they’re watermelons, green on the outside to give themselves the protective veneer of eco-allegiance, but dead red socialist on the inside.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
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