Joe Biden at the helm of the White House is a scary thought for many. Millions of Americans don’t trust him.
And that’s because President Biden’s treasonous act has put America in grave danger.
Several energy policy professionals informed the Daily Caller News Foundation that President Joe Biden’s decision to draw on the strategic petroleum reserve (SPR) in late 2021 and 2022 puts the United States in a precarious position at a time when a conflict in the Middle East threatens to disrupt oil supply.
After seeing fuel costs increase for American consumers in late 2021 and early 2022, Vice President Biden determined to release 180 million barrels of oil from the SPR. This decision caused political problems for Biden and his fellow Democrats in the run-up to the midterm elections. Now that war has broken out between Israel and Hamas, a terrorist organization backed by Iran, the SPR has about 17 days of emergency supply left, putting the U.S. in a vulnerable position if the fight intensifies and further destabilizes the Middle East, analysts told the DCNF.
“It was a colossal mistake to use the strategic petroleum reserve as a strategic political reserve to try to buy Biden some goodwill during the midterms,” American Energy Alliance president Tom Pyle told the DCNF. According to Pyle, “it is unconscionable that the administration would use a hedge against these sorts of unpredictable geopolitical events to win a few seats in a midterm election,” adding that the decision “puts us in a precarious position, because we do not know how things in the Middle East might escalate given this shocking and unprecedented event.”
In August, the DOE chose not to restock the SPR because of weak market conditions; this was the lowest level it has been since 1983. After Biden’s releases in July, multiple energy experts warned that it could take “decades” to replenish the SPR.
When oil prices were at $25 per barrel, Democrats blasted then-President Trump for exploring a replenishment plan, calling it a giveaway to Big Oil. Since October of 2022, crude oil futures have traded at a price above $65 per barrel.
According to two sources in The Wall Street Journal, Hamas alleges Iran supported the brutal strikes on Saturday that sparked the ongoing conflict. There has been no definitive evidence found linking the Iranian dictatorship to the Hamas rampages, but the Biden administration strongly denounced the attacks and restated its full backing for Israel as it hits back, as reported by Reuters.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Iran produced around 3 million barrels of oil per day as of August, which is almost 3% of the world’s daily production.
“Biden drained the Strategic Petroleum reserves to keep the Senate in Democrat control after the 2022 midterm elections. We had no oil crisis,” Daniel Turner, head of Power The Future, told the DCNF. “One bad Gulf hurricane could cripple our economy… imagine the chaos if we had a real oil crisis,” he continued, referring to a potential disruption in oil supplies caused by war in the Middle East or other reasons outside of U.S. government control.
Approximately 6 million barrels were sold to China after being released from the SPR in July 2021.
A repeat of the 1973 oil crisis might be triggered by the conflict between Israel and Hamas. When the United States decided to send aid to the Israeli military as it fought against Arab invasion on Yom Kippur, the oil producing cartel OPEC responded by imposing an embargo on American oil exports.
The DOE reports that in 1975, the Ford administration established the SPR as an emergency resource in response to price spikes that had a lasting negative impact on the American economy.
Dan Kish, senior fellow at the Institute for Energy Research, explained to the DCNF that the SPR was established because of the OPEC embargo and was subsequently sold off to buy votes in the general election held last fall. “With a fawning press corps that is at once incurious as well as supportive of their anti-domestic energy agenda, they just figure they can pull the wool over the public’s eyes and get away with it,” Kish said of the Biden administration.
According to Semafor, if Hezbollah, a terrorist group located in Lebanon and a supporter of the Iranian dictatorship, joins the fighting against Hamas along Israel’s northern border, the battle might escalate into a wider regional confrontation.
Expert on energy and veteran of the oil and gas industry for 40 years, David Blackmon, told the DCNF that the history of every war fought in the last 120 years shows just how important it is to preserve a sufficient amount of petroleum and keep supply lines open for supplying any nation’s military.
He went on to say that “one would have hoped the people in the White House and the Pentagon would have a grasp on this unambiguous lesson of history,” and that “it should be obvious to everyone by now that the Biden administration does not maintain adequate respect for the need to maintain U.S. energy security.”
The White House and the Department of Energy did not immediately reply to calls for comment from the DCNF.
The Democrats may have sought to use the draining of the SPR to their political benefit for the 2022 midterms, but that decision may come back to haunt them in the more critical 2024 election cycle.
Stay tuned to the DC Daily Journal.
