U.S. SPR released exports to Europe and Asia last month, including China, the top U.S. geopolitical nemesis on the global stage, despite record high U.S. gasoline and diesel prices.
Exports of crude oil and fuel are damping the impact of U.S. President Joe Biden’s lowering of record gas prices. In a conference call Saturday, Biden renewed his call for gasoline suppliers to lower prices, prompting justified criticism from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as the hunt for husband-and-wife gas stations only proved how incompetent the aging presidential stooge’s handlers are.
As of October, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve was being depleted at an unprecedented rate of about 1 million barrels per day. The depletion means that SPR stocks are at their lowest level since 1986. U.S. crude oil futures prices are above $100 per barrel, and one-fifth of the nation’s gasoline and diesel fuel prices are above $5 per gallon. U.S. officials have said that if the SPR had not been utilized, oil prices could have been higher, and for once they are right. Still, the question of what will happen to oil prices when the U.S. can no longer sell SPR in fear of a real emergency remains: we know the answer, and the Biden administration won’t like it.
“The Strategic Petroleum Reserve remains a key energy security tool to address global crude supply disruptions,” an Energy Department spokesman said, adding that emergency releases help ensure crude supply stability.
Phillips 66, the fourth-largest U.S. refiner, shipped about 470,000 barrels of sulfur-laden crude oil from its Big Hill SPR storage site in Texas to Trieste, Italy, Reuters tracked, citing customs data. Trieste owns a pipeline that carries oil to refineries in Central Europe. Meanwhile, Atlantic Trading & Marketing (ATMI), a unit of French oil giant TotalEnergies, exported two shipments of 560,000 barrels each. An industry source said SPR crude cargoes were also shipped to Reliance refineries in the Netherlands and India.
Most notably, the third shipment goes to America’s number one enemy, China, which now directly benefits at the expense of American consumers due to Biden’s escalating panic to eliminate the consequences of his disastrous green policies by selling the most valuable products. American assets straight to Beijing!
But even scarier was the ensuing conversation, when asked if the U.S. sold emergency reserve oil to China, the White House simply did not respond.
Matt Smith, chief oil analyst at Kpler, pointed this out. Stating “if (the SPR release) hadn’t happened, crude oil and fuel prices could have been higher, but at the same time, it didn’t really have the hypothetical impact.”
While midterm elections will come and go and Democrats will suffer historic losses, the U.S. energy situation is becoming increasingly dire due to executive branch incompetence and/or corruption: crude oil inventories are at their lowest levels since 2004 and refineries are running near peak levels. U.S. Gulf Coast refinery utilization is at 97.9%, the highest in three and a half years. This means that even the smallest accident can and will push oil prices to the moon