The US strategic reserve remains the world’s largest even after Biden drew it down. But “there’s months of supply in there still it’s not empty, it’s not even close to being empty,” said Jim Krane, an energy research fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. The reserve now contains fewer barrels of crude oil – about 355.4 million as of late May – than it had since 1983, so it’s at a 40-year low (though not a 50-year low). Trump also claimed on Fox that, as a result of Biden’s sales from the reserve, “the thing is almost empty now” and that “it’s totally empty.” He added, “It’s the emptiest I think it’s been in 50 years.” “Trump really can’t argue that he left it in better shape than he found it,” said Ed Hirs, an energy fellow and economics lecturer at the University of Houston. But nonetheless, Trump’s claims about how he “filled up” the reserve are meritless.Įven the one significant increase in the number of barrels in the reserve during the Trump presidency, a spike of about 21 million barrels in 2020, was short-lived – the result of a Trump program that allowed companies to temporarily house some of their own crude in the reserve during a period when storage space was scarce. That’s in large part because of oil sales that Congress had mandated by law. In fact, the reserve, which has an authorized storage capacity of 714 million barrels of oil, contained fewer barrels when Trump left office in early 2021 (about 638 million) than when he took office in early 2017 (about 695 million). And then Biden came along and took it to keep prices down – and it’s called artificially down.”īut Trump did not actually fill up the reserve. Trump claimed last year that he got the reserve to “100% full.” On Fox on Thursday, Trump said, “You know, we had the strategic national reserves almost full. Here’s a look at additional ways his remarks have been false or misleading. He has made related false claims for more than a year about his handling of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, drawing repeated debunkings from CNN, and other outlets. The former president’s comment wasn’t a one-time misstatement.
That is not even close to 75 million barrels Trump claimed he bought for “peanuts.”
Take five oil prices trial#
The Energy Department said in an email to CNN last week that the only oil purchase for the reserve during the Trump era was a “ trial purchase” of about 124,000 barrels in 2020. I suppose Trump can take credit for a good idea, but not for execution,” said Ben Cahill, a senior fellow in the Energy Security and Climate Change Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank. “It would have been a smart policy to refill the SPR at very low prices, but it didn’t happen because Congress did not approve that purchase. But Trump boasted on Fox that he overcame the congressional opposition and did buy tens of millions of barrels at those prices. Various Republicans have since criticized the Democrats for blocking Trump’s proposal, arguing that they caused the country to miss a golden opportunity to fill the reserve while prices were unusually low. But the Democratic-controlled Congress rejected the $3 billion in funding that would have paid for the purchase, describing it as a subsidy to big oil companies. Trump did propose to buy 77 million barrels for the reserve in 2020 as oil prices cratered because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Moments later, after criticizing President Joe Biden for selling a large quantity of oil from the reserve, Trump boasted once more about his own supposed discount purchase: “Think of it: 75 million barrels, and I bought it for peanuts, and Congress – I had to fight Congress, and the pricing was so crazy and so good.”įacts First: Trump’s supposed purchase of 75 million barrels of oil never happened. We bought a lot of it for very little for the strategic national reserves,” Trump said at a Fox event in Iowa.
“We had so much oil we didn’t know what to do with it. Former President Donald Trump, now a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, claimed in a television interview on Thursday that he not only purchased 75 million barrels of oil for the national Strategic Petroleum Reserve but did so for a remarkably low price.
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