On Wednesday, President Joe Biden announced he would authorize the release of an additional 15 million barrels of oil from the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
The draw completes the president’s March directive to release a total of 180 million oil barrels throughout the year.
Biden said the barrels will be released in December in an attempt to drive down gas prices and give families more “breathing room.”
“They’re not falling fast enough,” he said while speaking at the White House. “Families are hurting.”
The president said his administration would adopt a “ready and release plan” that would allegedly “allow [them] to move quickly to prevent oil price hikes and respond to international events.”
The Biden administration has been working to lower fuel costs as the midterm election approaches, and polling shows that gas prices will be a deciding factor in the elections.
A recent survey from the Convention of States Action and Trafalgar Group found that 54.4% of voters say rising gas prices will make them more likely to vote Republican in the 2022 midterms.
Many Republicans have accused the president of draining the nation’s oil reserve simply to benefit Democrats in the midterms.
“Today, President Biden will release 15 million barrels of oil from the SPR in a politically motivated attempt to artificially lower energy costs,” said Representative Roger Williams (R-TX). “The Administration’s Green New Deal agenda continues to compromise our national security and energy security.”
Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) said, “The SPR was built for a national energy crisis—not a Democrat election crisis. Joe Biden is draining our emergency oil supply to a 40-year low. His dismal approval rating is not a justifiable reason to continue to raid our nation’s oil reserves.”
However, Biden denied that this action is politically motivated.
“With my announcement today, we’re going to continue to stabilize markets and decrease the prices at a time when the actions of other countries have caused so much volatility,” he said, having previously specified that he blames Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the recent decision of OPEC+ to cut oil production for the current state of fuel prices.
Additionally, Biden accused oil companies of price gouging to increase profits.
The president urged American companies to increase domestic oil production with the understanding that the government will buy the barrels later when prices drop to what the White House projects could be $70 per barrel.
At the beginning of his term in January 2021, however, President Biden signed an executive order entitled “Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad,” which halted the sale of new oil and gas leases on public lands and in offshore waters.
Louisiana and Alaska are two of 13 states which subsequently filed a lawsuit challenging the executive order. On August 18, 2022, a federal court in Louisiana permanently blocked the Biden administration from halting new lease sales in those states.
Biden also signed the Inflation Reduction Act in August, which uses tax credits to incentivize non-oil “clean energy” such as wind and solar power.
In April, oil executives testified before Congress that oil is a global market and that American oil companies do not dictate prices.
“We do not control the market price of crude oil or natural gas, nor of refined products like gasoline and diesel fuel, and we have no tolerance for price gouging,” said Chevron CEO Mike Wirth.
The Biden administration’s recent warning toward Saudi Arabia over the OPEC+ oil production cut was, in part, because the White House said it would increase gas prices, as previously covered by The Dallas Express.
The United States uses roughly 20 million barrels of oil per day, meaning that selling 15 million additional barrels from the oil reserve may not significantly affect gas prices.
In September, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, established after the 1970s oil crisis as a national energy safety net, reached its lowest level since 1984, according to the Department of Energy (DOE).
During his administration, former president Donald Trump directed the DOE to “fill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) to its maximum capacity by purchasing 77 million barrels of American-made crude oil.”
Biden first began releasing oil from the SPR in November 2021 “as part of ongoing efforts to lower prices and address lack of supply around the world.”
Charts detailing the history of the SPR’s supply level can be found here.
