US President Joe Biden, faced with record inflation undermining his popularity, will tap into America’s huge oil reserves as never before to try to stem soaring prices at the pump. He ordered to draw one million barrels a day from strategic oil reserves for six months, an initiative “unprecedented” in American history, the White House announced Thursday.
The prospect of this record dumping of American black gold was already lowering prices on Thursday in London and New York by around 5%.
This initiative must, according to a press release from the American executive, serve to “make the transition until the (American) production increases at the end of the year”. The US administration will use revenue from the sale of these reserves to replenish stocks “in the years to come”. The White House, which the Republican opposition accuses of weighing down oil activity in the United States, promises to “to do everything (she) can” to encourage extraction in the United States.
The US Strategic Petroleum Reserves were created in 1975 to counter oil shocks.
Buried in huge salt caverns up to 800 meters deep along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, they can store up to 714 million barrels of black gold but currently hold 568 million barrels.
The US administration has already been drawing on these strategic reserves continuously since the fall, when the rise in oil prices took hold.