Fmr. Obama Energy Secretary: ‘Depleted’ SPR Would Make Us ‘Severely Compromised’ in Another Crisis, Biden Broke Promise to Refill

On Monday’s broadcast of Bloomberg’s “Balance of Power,” Ernest Moniz, who served as Energy Secretary during the Obama administration, warned that due to how much the Strategic Petroleum Reserve has been depleted, “if we had another major issue to deal with, we would be severely compromised” and stated that the Biden administration didn’t fill the Reserve when it said it would. Moniz also criticized Congress for using the SPR to fund things unrelated to energy.

Co-host Joe Mathieu asked, [relevant exchange begins around 29:10] “I would love to ask you while you’re with us about refilling the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, knowing that there was at least a brief opportunity to do so at profit a couple of weeks ago. … Of course, a barrel of oil was selling for something in the 60s just a couple of weeks ago. Did we miss an opportunity?”

Moniz responded, “Well, we had said — the Biden administration had said that we would start refilling the Petroleum Reserve when prices went below 70. They were pretty briefly below 70, I have to say. But I’ll say, Joe, I think the bigger problem — and this was the case when I was Secretary — the Congress did not, I think, put enough emphasis on energy security issues at that time. Now,  of course, there’s a very, very different view. But the reality is, when I was Secretary — and I complained about this to committee chairs and the like — that they started to use the Petroleum Reserve frankly as a piggy bank to address other issues, important issues, but not connected to energy and security. For example, addressing health research, cancer research, was partly funded for by writing an IOU against the Petroleum Reserve. Now we wish we had those hundreds of millions of barrels back in the Reserve. … [P]rices could drop lower, but we don’t know. It’s really going to depend, I think, very much on the great uncertainty in demand. We just heard, on your program, that China may start growing again, increasing demand. But the West may go into recession, which would obviously suppress demand. I think we just don’t know. But as — if prices do drop, I would certainly support getting the [SPR] back to a useful tool. Right now, it’s been depleted and there are further liens on it, as I said, from Congress, that, if we had another major issue to deal with, we would be severely compromised with the current size of the Petroleum Reserve.”

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