President Biden’s decision to drain the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) to its lowest level in decades is back in the spotlight amid the war between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, which has caused oil prices to surge.
On Monday, the Brent crude index, the worldwide oil benchmark, and the U.S. WTI index both surged more than 4% and inched closer to $90 a barrel as a result of volatility created by the Middle East crisis. [emphasis, links added]
According to analysts, the conflict — triggered over the weekend after a series of unprovoked attacks by Palestinian militants on Israelis — may lead to large amounts of global oil supplies being withheld.
“If the conflict envelopes Iran… up to 3% of global oil supply is at risk. And if a wider conflict eventuates that ends up impacting transit through the Strait of Hormuz, around 20% of global oil supply could be held hostage,” energy analyst Saul Kavonic said in an interview with Reuters.
“Timing is everything and the attacks almost certainly postpone any Saudi-Israeli rapprochement, along with any high probability expectation of Saudi Arabia reducing or eliminating its extra one million [barrels per day] cut if prices resume their recent fall,” analysts with Citibank added in a note.
However, the Biden administration has depleted the SPR, which contains an emergency oil supply and was established for emergency scenarios, to its lowest level in four decades.
The SPR currently contains 351.3 million barrels of oil, 44% lower than it was in January 2021 when Biden took office and a level last recorded in September 1983 prior to this year.
Since taking office, Biden has ordered the Department of Energy to release a total of about 260 million barrels of oil stored in the SPR to combat high fuel prices that hit consumers in late 2021 and mid-2022.
While the administration has recently initiated the process of refilling the emergency reserve, Republican lawmakers and energy experts have warned its actions make the U.S. vulnerable to short-term supply shocks.
“There are a lot of reasons why the Biden administration should not have used the SPR to try to bring down prices — one of which is that the SPR then isn’t available if something serious happens. We’re facing that right now,” Ben Lieberman, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told Fox News Digital in an interview. “The point was for the nation to have an emergency oil supply.”
“And it’s especially foolish given the backdrop of this administration’s hostility to domestic oil production,” he added.
Read more at Fox News
More incredible idiocy by this administration. Destroy our own oil industry but when times get tough tap the SPR to save his sorry ass. But I question the use of the term “Palestinian militants. They were not militants. They were TERRORISTS given what they did. And any Hamas member who is not killed by the Israeli forces must be tried and executed for war crimes.