Joe Biden released millions of barrels of oil from the strategic oil reserves. Now at least one expert questions if this was legal.
The Gateway Pundit has reported on Biden’s actions related to the US strategic oil reserves numerous times. Biden released millions of barrels in these reserves but the beneficiaries were Asian countries and Europe.
Now a former government worker under President Trump questions whether the release of this massive amount of oil from these reserves was even legal. The Daily Caller writes:
A former Trump administration official suggested that President Joe Biden’s recent release of 180 million barrels of oil from emergency stockpiles is unlawful.
Biden’s action violated the 1975 Energy Policy and Conservation Act which established the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), Mark Robeck — the former deputy general counsel for energy policy at the Department of Energy (DOE) during the Trump administration — wrote in a Washington Examiner editorial Thursday. The law prohibits the release of emergency SPR stocks unless there is a severe domestic supply shortage, an act of sabotage or natural disaster, he said.
“In short, Congress imposed a predicate circumstance of a ‘severe energy supply disruption’ for the president and secretary of energy to authorize the sale of crude oil from the SPR, and such a disruption simply does not exist right now,” Robeck wrote in the editorial. “The unlawful release of oil from the SPR threatens national security by depleting the SPR absent a true supply disruption.”
On March 31, Biden ordered the DOE to release a million barrels of oil per day for six months, the largest release in U.S. history. Biden had also ordered a 30-million-barrel release on March 1 and a 50-million-barrel release in late 2021.
The article goes on to mention that US stockpiles under Biden put America at risk in case a real issue happens with oil availability, like a war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. This is the kind of event that the stockpile was made for.
The SPR, designed to store 714 million barrels of crude for emergencies, is currently at less than 600 million barrels, its lowest level since 2002, according to the Energy Information Administration. A release of 180 million barrels is expected to take the stockpile to its lowest level ever.
Prior to 2021, the most recent SPR emergency release took place amid the Libyan civil war in 2011 when former President Barack Obama tapped the reserves as Middle Eastern oil supplies dramatically fell.
Does Biden do anything for America? Who is running this American disaster?