On Monday, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced that it will purchase up to 3 million barrels of oil for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) after the Biden regime aggressively drained the US stockpile.
A record-breaking 180 million barrels were released from the SPR by the Biden regime. According to the US Energy Information Administration, the SPR held about 638 million barrels of oil when Biden took office in January 2021. It has dropped to its lowest level since October 1983 today, at 362 million barrels.
“Today’s announcement advances the President’s replenishment strategy following his historic release from the SPR to address the significant global supply disruption caused by Putin’s war on Ukraine and provide a wartime bridge for domestic production to increase,” according to DOE’s news release.
Adding, “DOE is committed to executing an SPR replenishment strategy that provides the best deal for taxpayers— aiming to repurchase crude at a lower price than the average of about $95 per barrel it was sold for in 2022, while strengthening energy security by providing certainty to the industry in a way that helps encourage near-term supply. DOE intends to purchase more oil later this year.”
Recall, Joe Biden wanted to fill the Strategic Reserves with $80 per barrel oil. Just three years ago the Democrats blocked President Trump from filling the Strategic Oil Reserves at $24 per barrel.
Reuters reported:
U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm had signaled to lawmakers late last week that her department could start repurchasing oil for the stockpile soon, after a record sale last year during a spike in prices that pushed the level of the reserve to the lowest since 1983.
The new purchase would be for sour crude oil delivered to the Big Hill SPR site in Texas sometime during the month of August, according to the announcement.
The administration has said it would start to buy oil back into the reserve when prices are consistently at or below $67 to $72 per barrel, well-below the level at which the oil had been sold, so that taxpayers can get some benefit.
U.S. crude prices were around $71 a barrel on Monday.
Granholm last month had signaled that repurchases would happen closer to the end of the year, after maintenance on two of the reserve’s four sites on the coasts of Texas and Louisiana.
Biden waged a war on domestic oil production as soon as he was sworn into office. Biden’s energy policy is to take from the nation’s oil reserves rather than allow American companies to drill and produce American oil.
On his first day in office, Joe Biden killed off 42,100 jobs by ending the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline.
Biden announced he was going to open the US oil reserves last 2021 even before the Ukraine-Russia war, in an effort to lower gas prices ahead of the holiday season.
The Gateway Pundit reported that last November 2021 Biden regime had sold America’s reserves of oil to Asia. How does this make sense?
Biden released millions of barrels in these reserves but the beneficiaries were Asian countries and Europe.
A former government worker under President Trump questions whether the release of this massive amount of oil from these reserves was even legal.
Daily Caller reported:
A former Trump administration official suggested that President Joe Biden’s recent release of 180 million barrels of oil from emergency stockpiles is unlawful.
Biden’s action violated the 1975 Energy Policy and Conservation Act which established the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), Mark Robeck — the former deputy general counsel for energy policy at the Department of Energy (DOE) during the Trump administration — wrote in a Washington Examiner editorial Thursday. The law prohibits the release of emergency SPR stocks unless there is a severe domestic supply shortage, an act of sabotage or natural disaster, he said.
“In short, Congress imposed a predicate circumstance of a ‘severe energy supply disruption’ for the president and secretary of energy to authorize the sale of crude oil from the SPR, and such a disruption simply does not exist right now,” Robeck wrote in the editorial. “The unlawful release of oil from the SPR threatens national security by depleting the SPR absent a true supply disruption.”
On March 31, Biden ordered the DOE to release a million barrels of oil per day for six months, the largest release in U.S. history. Biden had also ordered a 30-million-barrel release on March 1 and a 50-million-barrel release in late 2021.
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