I can't say that I was surprised when the Biden administration announced on Wednesday that its original plan to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve has been put on hold. Nothing Joe Biden has done with the handling of the SPR has been good.
As you may recall, gas prices skyrocketed under Joe Biden, and it was a huge political problem for him and the Democrats. So before the 2022 midterm elections, Biden raided our nation's emergency supply of petroleum to get prices down as much as possible, depleting the reserves to their lowest levels since the 1980s. This, of course, is not what the reserves were meant for. The primary purpose is to provide a buffer against disruptions in oil supplies and to safeguard national energy security in times of crisis, such as natural disasters, geopolitical conflicts, or other significant disruptions in oil production or distribution — not to help your party win elections.
Before the midterm elections, Biden infamously sought to pressure OPEC to increase oil production, but those efforts failed miserably. After depleting the reserves in 2022, the administration was supposed to replenish the supply, but those plans have been put on hold. And why? Because oil is too expensive.
"The Energy Department said it was 'keeping the taxpayer’s interest at the forefront' in its decision not to purchase as many as 3 million barrels of oil for a Strategic Petroleum Reserve site in Louisiana," reports Bloomberg. "The plan for the barrels to be delivered in August and September had been announced in mid-March."
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“We will not award the current solicitations for the Bayou Choctaw SPR site and will solicit available capacity as market conditions allow,” the Department of Energy said in a statement. “We will continue to monitor market dynamics.”
Trump had sought to replenish the SPR in 2020 when oil prices were roughly $25 a barrel, but Democrats opposed the plan, calling it a handout to Big Oil. The Biden administration has been looking to buy oil at closer to $79 a barrel; however, prices exceeded $85 a barrel this week.
"The Energy Department has been slowly refilling the emergency oil supply after it reached a 40-year-low following the administration’s unprecedented drawdown of a record 180 million barrels in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine," reports Bloomberg. "It currently holds about 363 million barrels, according to Energy Department data, down from almost 600 million at the start of 2022."
From a national security perspective, this is a horrible time to for the Strategic Petroleum Reserves to be more than half-empty. I can't imagine that Biden's national security advisors are telling him it's okay for our reserves to be so low right now. Nor has Biden been shy about spending money and adding to the national debt, so why isn't ensuring that we have an adequate supply important enough?
What's this really about? Is Biden trying to keep the market supply of oil high enough to stop prices from going up even higher, in the hopes of saving his election? We know he's not above manipulating the market for political gain; is that what's happening here?
