Biden Made Secret Offer to Buy Tons of OPEC+ Oil at $80 a Barrel in Exchange for Not Cutting Production - Got Rebuffed

In 2020, Democrats blocked Trump's proposal to buy American oil at $24 a barrel.

Yesterday, a Biden official disclosed a secret offer to buy OPEC+ oil at $80 a barrel in exchange for not cutting production.

Biden's efforts backfired. The US is weakened.https://t.co/ygwOZqPIBk

— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) October 5, 2022

In early September, United States Secretary of Energy, Jennifer Granholm, told Reuters that President Joe Biden was considering extending the release of oil from America’s emergency stockpiles, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), through October, and thus beyond the date when the program had been set to end. But then, a few hours later, an official with the Department of Energy called Reuters and contradicted Granholm, saying that the White House was not, in fact, considering more SPR releases. Five days later, the White House said it was considering refilling the SPR, thereby proposing to do the exact opposite of what Granholm had proposed.

The confusion around the Biden administration’s petroleum policy was cleared up yesterday after a senior official revealed that the White House had made a secret offer to buy up to 200 million barrels of OPEC+ oil to replenish the SPR in exchange for OPEC+ not cutting oil production. The official said the White House wanted to reassure OPEC+ that the US “won’t leave them hanging dry.” The fact that this offer was made through the White House, not the Department of Energy, may explain why a representative of the Department called Reuters to take back the remarks of Granholm, who has shown herself to be out-of-the-loop, and at a loss for words, relating to key administration decisions relating to oil and gas production.

The revelation poses political risks for Democrats who, in the spring of 2020, killed a proposal by President Donald Trump to replenish the SPR with oil from American producers, not OPEC+ ones, and at a price of $24 a barrel, not the $80 a barrel that the Biden White House promised to OPEC+. At the time, Trump was seeking to stabilize the American oil industry after the Covid-19 pandemic massively reduced oil demand. Trump and Congressional Republicans proposed spending $3 billion to fill the SPR. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer successfully defeated the proposal, and later bragged that his party had blocked a “bailout for big oil.”

For the past several days, Biden’s senior-most energy, economic and foreign policy officials were enlisted to lobby their foreign counterparts in Middle Eastern allied countries including Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates to vote against cutting oil production. Wednesday’s production cut amounts to the largest cut since the beginning of the pandemic and could lead to a dramatic spike in oil prices.

Some of the draft talking points circulated by the White House to the Treasury Department on Monday that were obtained by CNN framed the prospect of a production cut as a “total disaster” and warned that it could be taken as a “hostile act.”

“It’s important everyone is aware of just how high the stakes are,” said a US official of what was framed as a broad administration effort that is expected to continue in the lead up to the Wednesday OPEC+ meeting.

The White House is “having a spasm and panicking,” another US official said [...]

. @HHShkMohd receives Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in #Dubai. #UAE pic.twitter.com/VPeiEW0AgU

— Dubai Media Office (@DXBMediaOffice) March 18, 2022