As Townhall reported earlier, President Biden is working on a plan for his administration to release up to one million barrels of oil per day for an extended length of time in an attempt to tamp down gas prices that hit all-time highs earlier in March. The plan would be the largest release of strategic reserves by the United States, and comes after Biden released a smaller amount last November. This time, Biden's plan is set to release roughly one third of the current reserve stock.
If the U.S. goes through with releasing 180 million barrel release of crude, that'll amount to nearly one third of the nation's strategic petroleum reserve. pic.twitter.com/MCS49F2gVR
— Lisa Abramowicz (@lisaabramowicz1) March 31, 2022
Then, as now, the decision seems unlikely to make a difference, according to experts, for Americans who have seen inflation at 40-year highs outpace wage growth.
"Biden’s plan to release 1 million barrels of oil per day for up to 6 months is yet another pretend action to reduce gasoline prices," said Steve Milloy, the founder of JunkScience.com and former member of Trump's EPA transition team. "U.S. consumption is about 18 million barrels per day so Biden’s plan can and will have no meaningful effect on oil prices, especially given current pipeline and processing constraints," Milloy pointed out. "The only way out of the inflationary spike in oil prices is to unleash domestic production, including more pipelines and refinery capacity, which Biden refuses to do because of his climate agenda."
The CO2 Coalition's Executive Director Gregory Wrightstone pointed out that "daily world oil production since 2017 has ranged from 70.2 million BOPD to 84.5 million BOPD, so this proposed production from the SPR is nothing more than a rounding error that will not help American consumers in any meaningful manner."
President of the Heartland Institute James Taylor called out the Biden administration, noting "playing games with the Strategic Petroleum Reserve does little to mitigate skyrocketing gas prices and does nothing to fix the underlying cause of the problem. By vilifying and stifling domestic energy production, the Biden administration predictably created higher prices and more reliance on hostile nations like Russia, Iran, and Venezuela," Taylor emphasized. "Restoring pro-American energy policies is the only way to restore energy affordability, which will also create jobs throughout the economy."
"President Biden's decision to release more oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is just a larger band aid for the wounds inflicted on energy production by the Biden administration," said Myron Ebell, who heads up the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. "The Biden administration is still using every regulatory tool to slow oil and gas production on federal lands and offshore areas, delay pipeline and infrastructure approvals, and bully banks into dropping investments in new production."
As Katie reported, former President Donald Trump also blasted Biden's plan while reminding that his administration restocked the strategic reserves from which Biden is now drawing a record amount of oil.