Timing is everything: President Joe Biden, a political veteran who is watching his Democrat party candidates spiral in the polls across the country, has announced he’ll release another 15 million barrels of oil from the nation’s emergency oil reserve, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The SPR is already at such low levels that analysts have to go back to 1984, the year Cindi Lauper’s single “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” debuted, to find the nation’s reserves so depleted. The upcoming release will go through December, but will not solve the problem of declining oil production in America.
Since taking office, Biden has taken a stand against domestic production of oil, in favor of relying on imports from hostile states, pushing electric vehicles, solar power, and creating scarcity in order to drive demand for his Green New Deal agenda. Starting last November, the administration has released over 200 million barrels of crude oil from the reserve that was created in 1975 to protect the U.S. oil supply from a critical supply break from Middle East producers.
Alaska’s lone congresswoman, Mary Peltola has been silent on the matter in the weeks she has been in office, during which Biden has announced two additional releases of strategic oil, in order to bring down gas prices before the Nov. 8 election. As a Democrat, she cannot afford to go against the president.
Read: Biden taps Strategic Petroleum Reserve
U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan has not been silent. This month he introduced the Replenishing Our American Reserves (ROAR) Act, legislation that would require that the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve only include petroleum products produced in the United States, and only sell to domestic buyers.
“Last November, President Biden began draining our country’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve in a shortsighted attempt to control the skyrocketing gas prices his administration’s energy policies have wrought on American families,” said Sen. Sullivan. “At the time, I urged the President to drop the political window dressing and tap into a different strategic reserve—Alaska—by getting his boot off the neck of our producers. But President Biden has not relented in his war on American energy, and now our country’s strategic oil reserve is depleted to a level we haven’t seen in 35 years. We need to refill the SPR, and every drop of that oil should be produced by the hard-working men and women of the American energy sector.”
The petroleum reserve is down to a 57% capacity, with a total of 405.1 million barrels remaining as of two weeks ago. It has capacity for about 714 million barrels, which would be enough to replace imports of crude oil to the U.S. for about two years. The SPR only has enough now for a little more than a year, should the Saudis cut off their exports. The Saudis already cut their U.S. exports by 2 million barrels a day, and then reported to the news media that Biden had pleaded with them to hold off until after the November election.
Read: How low can it go? Biden releases even more from Strategic Petroleum Reserve
The U.S. sells more than twice from the salt cavern reserves than what flows through the Trans Alaska Pipeline System each day.
Meanwhile, in Congress, Democrats have proposed a bill that would allow the government to buy and sell oil from the Strategic Oil Reserve to other countries and use the money to fund electric car charging infrastructure.
Republican Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Eastern Washington State called out the Biden administration’s plans to further drain the strategic reserves. “Instead of using the SPR for political bailout and empowering America’s adversaries, President Biden should end his war on American energy and join Republican efforts to reclaim our energy dominance,” she said. She’s geographically one of the closest Republicans in Congress to Alaska, which is now represented in Congress by a Democrat.
While House and Senate Republicans have warned about the sell-off of the emergency reserves, Alaska Democrat Congresswoman Mary Peltola has been silent on the matter. Instead, she has been advocating for fish and tribes, abortion, and gun control. And fashionable qaspaqs at AFN.
When Congressman Don Young was in office, he immediately responded to the initial release of oil from the SPR last November, warning that it was a risky play for the country. But Peltola, in any of her issue-oriented remarks, has been focusing mostly on her abortion and fish agenda:
