Silver State Times

A recent analysis shows President Joe Biden's record-level releasing and selling of oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), intended to lower consumer gasoline prices, has had the opposite effect, as pump prices have actually risen. Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto applauded the administration's initial decision to release crude oil from the emergency stockpile back in November.

According to a press release, following Biden's announcement of a 50-million-barrel-release from the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) in November 2021, Cortez Masto sent a letter to the Biden administration to commend their decision to release the large amount of crude oil – a move that Cortez Masto urged the administration to make at a Senate hearing a week prior to his announcement.

"This is the right move. Rising gas prices are hurting Nevadans, which is why I urged the admin to take this important step last week. Moving forward, the White House must develop a long-term, coordinated strategy to keep costs down in Nevada and across the country," Cortez Masto wrote in a Nov. 23, 2021 Twitter post.

Since January of this year, Biden has sold 177 million barrels of oil with the intention of creating more gasoline supply. However, prices have actually risen by $0.50 per gallon over the period, according to an analysis by the Houston Daily. The average gas price in January 2022 was $3.28 per gallon and at the end of September 2022 it was $3.78 per gallon. Prices rose as high as $4.77 per gallon during the month of June, which is when Biden's SPR sales for the year surpassed a then-record 100 million barrels.

"So far, President Biden's unprecedented draining of the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve has led to higher gasoline prices, not lower ones," according to the analysis by Houston Daily.

The analysis found Biden has sold 222 million barrels of oil since being in the White House, which is effectively 70% of all SPR sales since the program's inception in 1975, 47 years ago. During the reserve's existence, only 318 million barrels of oil have been sold by the seven U.S. presidents in office. Prior to Biden's sales spree, the previous record was held by former President Barack Obama, who sold 36 million barrels of oil over eight years – only one-sixth of what Biden has sold over the course of less than two years in office.

On March 31, three months after the initial SPR sale, Biden announced that a "historic release from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve" was part of his strategy to lower record-high gas prices.

"The scale of this release is unprecedented: The world has never had a release of oil reserves at this 1 million per day rate for this length of time. This record release will provide a historic amount of supply," Biden said in a statement.

According to Houston Daily, the SPR was created as a response to the 1973 Arab oil embargo imposed against the United States. Congress sought to protect the U.S. from another oil shock by stockpiling oil for “emergency” use. The Reserve stores oil in four locations in the Gulf Coast region of the U.S., two in Louisiana and two in Texas.