Tag Archives: United States Strategic Oil Reserves

The Rest Of The Story…

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On July 6th I posted an article about oil from the United States’ Strategic Oil Reserve being shipped overseas. I was willing to give President Biden the benefit of the doubt because evidently there are international rules that govern where oil is sold. However, new information about the transactions involved is troubling.

Today The Federalist reported the following:

On Wednesday, Reuters revealed that more than 5 million barrels of oil from the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserves were sent overseas as part of President Joe Biden’s latest release initiated in March.

Some of that oil went to India, some to the Netherlands, and some was sent to China where the president’s son has engaged in years of potentially criminal business activity embroiling the Biden White House in scandal since the 2020 campaign.

On July 7th, The Washington Free Beacon reported:

“The Biden administration sold roughly one million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to a Chinese state-controlled gas giant that continues to purchase Russian oil, a move the Energy Department said would ‘support American consumers’ and combat ‘Putin’s price hike,’” the Beacon’s Collin Anderson reported. “Biden’s Energy Department in April announced the sale of 950,000 Strategic Petroleum Reserve barrels to Unipec, the trading arm of the China Petrochemical Corporation. That company, which is commonly known as Sinopec, is wholly owned by the Chinese government.”

…Power the Future founder Daniel Turner admonished Biden for selling “raw materials to the Communist Chinese for them to use as they want.”

“We were assured Biden was releasing this oil to America so it could be refined for gasoline to drive down prices at the pump. So right off the bat, they’re just lying to the American people,” Turner told the Washington Free Beacon. “What they’re saying they did and what they did are not remotely related.”

Turner also said the decision highlights the Biden family’s “relationship with China.” Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, is tied to Sinopec. In 2015, a private equity firm he cofounded bought a $1.7 billion stake in Sinopec Marketing. Sinopec went on to enter negotiations to purchase Gazprom in March, one month after the Biden administration sanctioned the Russian gas giant.

Obviously some of the decisions made have not been in the best interests of Americans, and some of the decisions made have probably enriched the pockets of Hunter Biden. However, I predict there will be no consequences. It is too close to the mid-terms, and there are too many Republicans who are afraid to challenge any of the corruption in the Biden administration. It is a shame there are not enough principled Democrats or Republicans to speak out against obvious corruption.

This Is Just Wrong

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On July 5th, The U,K. Daily Mail reported that President Biden shipped five million barrels of oil from the United States’ Strategic Oil Reserve to Europe and Asia. The President told the American people that the oil was being released to help bring down the price of gasoline at the pump and thus ease expenses for Americans. Evidently, that was not the whole story.

The article reports:

The president faces accusations of a sneaky sleight of hand as it was revealed that between a fifth and a sixth of the reserve oil he bragged about releasing to boost supply made its way offshore to Europe and Asia in June.

Biden authorized the release of a million barrels a day from April onwards. But his action has done little to combat soaring gas prices, with the national average sitting at $4.74 as of Tuesday – still far above the $2.28-a-gallon average from just before he took office. 

Biden’s announcement about releasing the oil barrels was made in April, and saw him say: ‘These releases will put more than one million barrels per day on the market over the next six months, and will help address supply disruptions caused by Putin’s further invasion of Ukraine and the Price Hike that Americans are facing at the pump.’

But it has had little effect, with a closer look at the press release revealing that the oil released from the strategic reserve was always destined for the highest bidder – even if they were overseas.

That is due to strict international rules dictating the sale and supply of oil – although a regular American who listened to Biden’s proclamation in passing would likely have believed that the increase in supply would have been destined for domestic refineries, to lower US prices. 

‘Crude and fuel prices would likely be higher if (the SPR releases) hadn’t happened, but at the same time, it isn’t really having the effect that was assumed,’ said Matt Smith, lead oil analyst at Kpler.

Government officials continue to defend Biden, and claim domestic gas prices would be even higher were it not for his release.  

The release of oil from the Strategic Oil Reserve is at best a temporary fix. America was energy independent when President Biden took office and inflation was under control. The amount of money from American energy that was flowing into the tax coffers of America was also helping offset some of the out-of-control spending. The simplest way to deal with inflation and help middle-class Americans cope with rising prices would be to open up American energy development quickly. Unfortunately, as long as the Democrats control Congress and the White House, that will not happen. If Republicans take Congress in 2022, the noose around the American energy sector might be loosened, but it will take a Republican President in 2024 to bring us back to economic stability. Meanwhile, expect gimmicks before the mid-term election to try to drop the price of gasoline, but understand that as soon as the election is over, the President will go back to limiting American energy unless a Republican Congress is in place to stop him.