

Lowering global oil prices almost inevitably means encouraging more U.S. His biggest priority is to slow down the scorching inflation that is driven in part by high energy prices, especially oil prices, that have surged largely because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Part of Biden’s struggle is that his desires seem to be directly at odds with one another. Democrats are heading for a disaster in this year’s midterm elections, and some people in his party have contemplated replacing Biden on its 2024 ticket, when he will be 81. His approval ratings are so low as to be lodged in a subterranean salt cavern of their own. After entering the White House with dreams of becoming the next FDR, Biden’s many plans have been tripped up by, well, just about everything-inflation, the war in Ukraine, Senator Joe Manchin, and his own mistakes. Advocates of the policy say that it may allow the government to stabilize energy markets, lower gas prices-and maybe even help the climate along the way. Yesterday, the White House announced that it would rewrite the rules governing the reserve so that it can buy a barrel of oil without actually getting it delivered for months, essentially providing domestic oil drillers with a form of insurance and placing a partial floor under oil prices.

It is the largest and fastest release of SPR supplies ever, an emergency release that Biden says is justified by “Putin’s price hike at the pump.” Along with recession fears and China’s ongoing lockdowns, the release has helped lower oil and gasoline prices since they peaked earlier this year.īut the reserve might soon play a more prominent role for the Biden administration and the American public than it does right now. Since April, the government has sold about 1 million barrels a day from the reserve to private oil companies. But in recent months, it has become a lifeline for President Joe Biden. Created after the 1973 oil embargo, the reserve has become a kind of all-purpose cushion for oil supplies in times of war or natural disaster. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve, or SPR, is one of those pieces of infrastructure that nobody needs to think about in ordinary times. Together, these caverns, which are wide and deep enough to swallow the Empire State Building, make up the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a marvel of American engineering and the largest emergency stockpile of crude oil anywhere in the world. These facilities conceal something extraordinary: a network of cathedral-esque caverns carved into underground rock salt that can collectively hold more than 700 million barrels of oil.
#Cheap gasoline near me Patch
government sites that look like nothing special-a bland patch of concrete, a few office buildings, some oil silos huddled together. If you drive along the Gulf of Mexico from Corpus Christi, Texas, to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, you will pass four U.S. Sign up for The Weekly Planet, Robinson Meyer’s newsletter about living through climate change, here.
