Us tapping into oil reserves

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Joe Biden is tapping into strategic oil reserves to pump 60 million barrels to avoid price sky rocketing due to the war. This is the second time Joe Biden has done this in his presidency and the first time he did it prices fell,if I remember correctly, about 30 cents a gallon in just a few days (from only pumping 40 million barrels or 2 days worth of oil for USA). If pumping more of our own oil causes oil prices to drop why dont we do it more? According to multiple sources the USA has control of more oil reserves than any country in the world. Yet we do not pump as much as we could and instead buy it from overseas which seems to cause the prices to go up.

In my opinion this is to appease environmentalists but it actually has no effect on pollution because we are still using oil even if its not our own. If oil and energy prices were cheaper that would allow some prices to drop also because the cost of shipping is cheaper. We do the same thing with coal and natural gas. We have tons of it but we use other countries coal and gas instead. This has hurt our steel industry as well. We should use it before it possibly becomes obsolete due to advancements in green energy technology. Its possible in a century we wont even need it and it will have been wasted instead of using it to boost our economy. Its all about PR but it does not make sense.

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Comments ( 2 )
  • Boojum
    1 year ago

    One reason the US government doesn't do this is because there's a finite amount of oil stored in the facilities. Apparently it's around 700 million barrels at the moment (which is a mindboggling amount of anything), but obviously, once it's gone, it's gone, and it doesn't take too many rounds of releasing tens of millions of barrels for the tanks to run dry.

    The other reason it's not done routinely is hinted at in the name of the facility. It's meant to be an emergency reserve. The Reserve was created after the energy crisis of 1973 (about which I have very un-fond memories), because the US government decided it had to avoid ever being in a position where it could literally be held hostage by oil-producing countries. Maybe that seems unlikely at this point, but the last week has reminded us that the world isn't short of megalomaniac nuts in charge of countries.

    https://www.energy.gov/fecm/strategic-petroleum-reserve-9

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    • Anonymous Post Author
      1 year ago

      I think that 700 million figure is of our emergency reserve.
      According to many sources we have in the usa anywhere from 35-42 billion barrels of proven crude oil. But according to a study by Rystad in 2016 the USA has the most oil reserves of shale oil which according to them the US has a combined 264 billion barrels of crude and shale oil combined. Apparently shale is harder to get to but it is possible to get it but I guess this is less economically feasible than just buying it elsewhere until you get around to finding it and retrieving it. But if my math is right that means we could last for 36 1/2 years off our own oil if we used the same amount as now.

      https://www.aogr.com/web-exclusives/exclusive-story/u.s.-holds-most-recoverable-oil-reserves

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