Grand Canyon 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. Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly urged the president back in February to initiate the oil release from the reserve.

Amid high gas prices in late February, Kelly wrote a letter to Biden, calling on him to release oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, as reported by The Hill.

“Another release, especially if done in coordination with our allies and other nations, could help blunt rising oil prices and the corresponding prices that Americans pay at the pump,” Kelly wrote in his letter, even after Biden had released 50 million barrels from the reserve in December 2021, according to The Hill. “As Russia continues its unprovoked attack on Ukraine, the average price of crude oil could remain above $100 per barrel and push the price of regular unleaded even higher than it is now.”

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.