I was thinking of Presidentish Joe Biden on Sunday when I was filling my Jeep’s smallish 15-gallon gas tank to the tune of $50 when it still had a couple of gallons left. Remember (because maybe he doesn’t) when Biden was emptying our Strategic Petroleum Reserve to force down gas prices in time for the midterms, promising to fill ‘er back up once prices dropped low enough?
Yeah, about that. The SPR is probably never going to be refilled, according to one expert, and maybe not even for the reason that first popped into your mind.
Let me set the stage for today’s big reveal.
The SPR was created under President Gerald Ford in 1975 following the 1973–1974 Arab oil embargo, which turned out to be just the first of that decade’s two major oil shocks. Set in massive salt caverns in Louisiana and Texas, the SPR was supposed to hold enough crude oil—714 million barrels— to help us weather any future embargo. While it was never large enough to do that for any significant time, the SPR’s very existence strengthened our geopolitical position versus some very nasty oil producers in places like Iran and Russia.
It took until about 2010—35 years!—to fill those reservoirs all the way up. It took Dementia Joe just two years to cut our reserves in half, down to levels not seen since 1983.
All to buy his party a few more votes on Election Day. “It could take decades to put it all back,” Julianne Geiger warned at OilPrice on Tuesday. (Hat tip, Zero Hedge.) Geiger writes that “the SPR could stay half-empty forever.”
That is, if prices ever come down long enough to make refilling profitable—if those salt caverns even can handle being refilled.
I always figured that the Biden Cabal was never serious about refilling the SPR. That crew cares about exactly one thing: the next election. If permanently damaging our economic security could save them a few House or Senate seats for just two years, well, that’s a small price (for somebody else) to pay.
But it was news to me when Geiger noted the “issue of infrastructure and feasibility of filling, withdrawing, refilling, etc. of the SPR.”
She continued:
Those salt caverns are made of… well, salt, and according to SPR former project manager William Gibson, who spoke to Bloomberg, they were built—in the ‘70s—with the idea that they would last 25 years. They were also designed to be withdrawn and refilled just five times, lest the salt caverns simply dissolve.
As one former official put it, the caverns were “not really intended for daily ATM-type operations.”
So. Even if the Biden Cabal were willing to risk sending gas prices back up by pumping more crude into SPR storage (which they aren’t), they’d have to take into account the advanced age of the facilities (which they won’t) and prepare to find replacements (which their Green Nude Eel friends would forbid).
In short, should the geopolitical situation or our domestic oil production suddenly change—either could make us more dependent again on foreign oil—we’d have an SPR cushion no bigger than it was in 1983.
1983, when our oil needs were much smaller and we were still in the process of wisely adding to the SPR instead of stupidly withdrawing from it like our national reserve is the Democrats’ private piggy bank.
Most days, I manage to laugh or at least just shrug at the short-sighted, destructive, vindictive, petty, and ham-fisted preening morons in the Biden White House, but today they have me seething.
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