Links tagged “oil”

Deroy Murdock: In fewer than 11 months, this administration has:

• Killed the Keystone XL pipeline.
• Threatened to plug the Canada-to-Michigan Enbridge Line 5 pipeline.
• Halted oil leases in a sliver of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
• Stopped oil and gas leases on federal lands.
• Proposed a methane tax that could cost this industry up to $10 billion annually.
• Encouraged left-wing activists to pressure financiers to defund oil companies.

And how is this multi-front war on oil working out? As predicted. ... To escape the political hell of what it considers high-gas-price heaven, Biden begs OPEC and the Kremlin to increase oil output. This is like the Anti-Saloon League beseeching Scotland to boost whiskey production after Prohibition shuttered U.S. distilleries. ... Biden’s own environmental objectives. At the margin, Biden’s approach would generate more carbon dioxide. North American crude cleanly crosses U.S. territory (and, to a degree, the Canadian border) via carbon-neutral pipelines. Conversely, Arab and Russian oil must traverse oceans and approach U.S. ports on fuel-burning, emissions-generating supertankers.

"It's not the business of the U.S. federal government to 'stockpile' anything. But as usual with government, the 'emergency' and "fear" cards are used as excuses for it to stockpile oil. However, we know not only from theory, but from practical experience, that in any emergency, the very last people that you want allocating resources are people in the federal government."

Fifty million barrels of oil sounds like a lot, right? It’s not — at all. In 2020, when consumption hit its lowest level in a quarter-century, the US consumed 18 million barrels of oil a day. Don’t take my word for it; the US Energy Information Administration has this data easily available. And that was after the largest single-year decline in consumption in US history to boot. Demand is higher now, while futures for production are signaling lower production.