Biden slated to tap strategic oil reserve again: Report
Vice President Joe Biden will make another decision on whether to tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserves (the report says the one that is being held by the U.S. government to last for the next 75 years) again when he meets with the nation’s top oil executives on Tuesday.
The meeting will include the top executives of the country’s top five oil companies.
Biden will tell them that he wants them to consider what they are doing to manage the strategic reserve in 2015.
That’s the year they were established. That’s when the government decided they could be used to boost the nation’s energy security. That’s seven years from now. On Tuesday, they will be revisited.
According to a report by McClatchy, Biden met with the heads of the top five oil companies last month.
“The meeting in his office came as the Obama administration is considering whether to reinstate the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a program that was in place for most of the past two decades to meet projected energy needs,” the Associated Press reported.
The program was set up after the 1979 energy crisis and was designed with $100 billion in reserve funds from the government.
It is expected to last another 75 years, until 2065.
President Barack Obama has said he doesn’t want the nation to end up with a large part of the nation’s oil reserves sitting in foreign hands.
Obama has called for a “rethinking” of the reserve. And his administration has been taking steps to reduce the size of the reserve.
Last month, the administration released a report of the review.
The report called for the number of strategic reserves to be reduced by 12 percent of the amount currently in place, from 5,200 million barrels down to 4,500 million.
Biden announced in May that he would look at reviving the reserve, saying in his announcement, “We should all be working to develop the resilience of American energy.”
But the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is an issue that is being discussed at the level of the U.S. Energy Department,
