For someone who has been in Federal office since 1973, it's disappointing how he forgot the lessons of the 1973 and 1979 Middle East energy crisises.
The Strategic Petroleum Reserve exits for national security - for the Defense Department and critical defense economic activities - not as a hydro-carbon slush fund to hide the true costs of Biden's war against American domestic energy.
Well, here's a view for the future, from ground level. We do have a choice.
Trump gets elected: "Drill baby, drill!" I'd expect lease offerings again on Federally owned land (about 1/2 the US west of the Mississippi and all the offshore Gulf of Mexico). THe Biden Administration has, in violation of Federal Law, failed to offer lease blocks or leases to the industry, and when those few exceptions were made, the Administration has done its best to encumber them with insane regulation, far beyond the onerous ones which were already in place and transcended common sense on many occasions.
That means that the current wells being drilled and on the schedule would have something beyond them, that is areas to drill after those wells already on the board have been completed. The Biden Harris plan is to deplete oil by leaving the rigs no place to drill when current leases have been drilled, which only defrays the shortage into the future. As wells currently producing deplete, there would be no new wells to replace that loss of production, and that would take a while to be felt. An aggressively pro-american energy administration could turn that around, but the clock is ticking.
Oil prices affect more than just motor fuels, with some 6000 products relying on the non motor fuel fraction of a barrel of oil for the feedstocks that make those products possible. I'm not sying that vegetable oils might make a suitable (chemically) replacement for some of those feedstocks, but that the price would be higher, and motor fuels would have to b invested to get those vegetable oil feedstocks,somethingwhich doesn't work economically or environmentally if all is factored in.
Harris, despite her campaign promise to not ban fraccing, has ardently been opposed to the completion technique that makes the shale boom and previous oil plays work. By using fluid pressure to fracture rock as deep as two miles from the surface, and entrained sand or ceramic pellets to hold those fractures open, an oil well can produce 5 or more times what it would without being thus treated. In making that transition, wells which might not have provided a ROI large enough or fast enough to be economical to drill become money makers, and a worthwhile investment. THe oil industry isn't a charity and can't print money, which means in order to remain in business, you have to show a profit. That not only keeps the stockholders happy, but puts money up for the next project. If you're a small oil company, that means the next well, if you are a large one, that means the next field, but either way, it funds the future.
Stop fraccing, and the second blow to the industry, now mostly confined to drilling privately owned mineral acres, reduces the output of the wells you drill by up to 80% or more. Suddenly, that prospect that seemed pretty good is in the not to be drilled category, and enough of those, and American oil production declines rapidly, and with that, our dependence on foreign sources goes up. Even electric cars use oil, in their construction, maintenance, lubrication, and for their tires. As we have seen with increasing gas and diesel prices, the price of literally everything goes up, from synthetic fabrics to pharmaceuticals, make-up to muskmelons, even products not immediately associated in the minds of the consumers rely on inexpensive fuel to be inexpensive, and if the chemicals used in their manufacture become more scarce, it's a double whammy.
This is just an energy based perspective.
Full disclosure: I have been employed in the oil industry since 1979, and am back out of retirement doing wells in the Williston Basin again. From an economic aspect that's a nice boost, but my Social Security alone pays my bills, what bills I have, anyway. I am not in a position to decide oil company policy. I'm just a consultant geologist in my present capacity and exert no significant pull in terms of the oil company's (whichever one I am working for) larger scope decisions. I do not own stock in any oil company or major oilfield service company.
