The Biden administration said Friday it has purchased its last batch of oil for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve after selling a record amount of oil in 2022 to counter rising fuel prices following Ukraine's invasion of Ukraine. Russia.
The Energy Department said it purchased 2.4 million barrels of oil for the reserve, which will be delivered in April and May to the Bryan Mound site in Texas.
The purchase exhausted the ministry's funds to purchase more oil for the reserve, the ministry said. The sale of 180 million barrels of crude oil in 2022 had raised nearly $17 billion in emergency revenue for buybacks, but Congress had canceled about $2.05 billion to help offset the national deficit .
The Biden administration repurchased 59 million barrels after the 2022 sale at an average price of less than $76 per barrel, far lower than the $95 per barrel it sold in 2022. This translated into a profit about $3.5 billion, according to the Department of Energy.
US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said the move confirmed “the administration's commitment to prioritizing the economic and energy security of the American people by taking actions that have helped stabilize prices at pump, provide certainty to the industry and maintain the SPR as the world's largest emergency crude oil reserve.”
The Biden administration also worked with Congress to cancel 140 million barrels of SPR oil sales that Congress had planned through 2027 and that Democratic and Republican lawmakers had voted for.
President-elect Donald Trump, a Republican, will have to work with Congress to replenish the department's procurement fund. Mr. Trump said he would put oil in the SPR.
The sale of 180 million barrels over six months in 2022 was the largest ever from the SPR. It helped counter gasoline prices in the United States, which reached a record level of more than $5 per gallon in June 2022.
It also caused the SPR level to fall to a 40-year low of less than 350 million barrels, drawing criticism from some lawmakers who said it reduced the United States' room for maneuver in energy security. The SPR currently contains nearly 390 million barrels. The largest volume of oil it has ever held was nearly 727 million barrels in 2009.
However, the United States is now the world's largest producer of oil and gas, thanks to techniques such as hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. They are more energy secure than in the mid-1970s, when Washington created the SPR, the world's largest emergency oil reserve, after supply shocks including the Arab oil embargo .
