Biden ready to empty US strategic oil reserve to a week’s supply to win election

All the Biden administration cares about is holding on to power by any means.

By Daniel Greenfield, Frontpage Magazine

When Biden took office, he inherited the over 630 million barrels of oil left behind by Trump and other previous administrations.

This was not far off the high of 727 million barrels in 2010.

Biden allowed the reserve to begin falling and then catastrophically depleted it to improve his party’s chances in the 2022 midterm elections. And he’s been at it again in 2024.

Now despite failing to refill the strategic oil reserve, he’s talking about emptying it further from the 300 million barrels or so in order to have an outside chance of winning the 2024 election.

Jennifer Granholm, Biden’s Secretary of Energy, the former notoriously inept and radical governor of Michigan, promised in March that the administration would somehow begin refilling the SPR despite high energy prices.

US stockpiles of crude oil in its strategic petroleum reserve (SPR) will equal or exceed the levels seen before a huge 180-million-barrel sale two years ago, US Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said at a conference on Monday.

In March 2022, President Joe Biden announced that 180 million barrels of crude from the reserve would be sold over six months – the largest SPR sale in history – to combat soaring energy prices in the wake of Russia’s war in Ukraine. The US is now replenishing the SPR and hopes to bring stores back to the levels seen before Moscow’s invasion, Granholm told the CERAWeek energy conference in Houston.

Spoiler alert: she lied. Biden will be emptying the SPR bone dry instead.

“The Biden-Harris Administration is laser-focused on lowering prices at the pump for American families, especially as drivers hit the road for summer driving season,” Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said in May.

The government spending money to buy oil and then release it (while blocking domestic drilling) isn’t actually saving American families money.

It’s a bait and switch. And here comes the big one.

President Joe Biden is prepared to release more oil from the country’s strategic reserves if gas prices increase during the summer.

“We will do everything we can to make sure that the market is supplied well enough to ensure as low [a] price as possible for American consumers,” Special Presidential Coordinator for Global Infrastructure and Energy Security Amos Hochstein told the Financial Times. “I think that we have enough in the SPR if it’s necessary.”

We have less than 400 million barrels. And the purpose of the SPR is not an election-day stunt. There’s a reason that “strategic” is in the name.

We use 20 million barrels a day. At the current rate, that means we can last less than a month. Once Biden empties the SPR again, we may not be able to make it through a week.

We’re facing potential wars that would wreak havoc with global energy prices. And with international supply flows.

But the Biden administration doesn’t care about any of that. All it cares about is holding on to power by any means.