An energy expert thinks America’s massive oil reserves should be sold off, maybe as much as half — if not all of it.
In a Wednesday interview with NPR, the global head of energy analysis for Oil Price Information Service, Tom Kloza said, “You might as well be wearing bell-bottoms as having 690 million barrels in storage,” indicating his belief that storing so much oil is an antiquated policy.
Kloza also said that since U.S. oil production is on the rise and imports are declining, the need for such massive reserves is antiquated.
The Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) was created in 1975 in response to the Arab oil embargo, which lead to a spike in oil prices and even saw Congress call for increasing fuel standards for cars.
Energy writer for The Heritage Foundation, Nicolas Loris, said the U.S. should sell the entire reserve.
“America is awash in natural resources and holds more crude and petroleum products in private inventory than it does in government-controlled inventory,” Loris wrote in a piece for The Heritage Foundation in August of 2015.
Loris continued, “The U.S. should withdraw from the Agreement on an International Energy Program and Congress should authorize the Department of Energy (DOE) to sell off the entire reserve, specifying that the revenues generated go solely toward deficit reduction.”
The SPR employs 126 federal workers and received $212 million for the program in fiscal year 2016.
The SPR currently holds 690 million barrels of oil, with the market price just about $50 a barrel that means that by selling just half of the SPR the U.S. government could see $17 billion, and with a full sell-off of the SPR that would be $34 billion. Money that some in Congress say could be spent on helping to repair a failing highway system.
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