Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee holds hearing on Strategic Petroleum Reserve
The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee recently held a hearing on the status of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR)
“You don’t give up your insurance policy when you’re healthy, and we should not give up the SPR just because we’re producing more oil right now,” U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), who chairs the committee, said in her opening statement. “The SPR is the most important strategic energy stockpile in the world and it is critical to American energy dominance.”
Murkowski highlighted the expanding Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) “Plus” group and its efforts to control prices as well as the potential for ongoing tensions in the Middle East to cause global price shocks as two ongoing threats to national energy security.
“The recent attacks on Saudi Arabian oil processing facilities, recurring incidents involving oil tankers, and persistent concerns about the Strait of Hormuz all foreshadow a potential nightmare,” Murkowski said. “The fact that we did not need to tap SPR after the Saudi outage does not in any way discount the value of having that option.”
Keisuke Sadamori, director for energy markets and security at the International Energy Agency, said that without strong emergency stocks, the market might have speculated about how to cope, causing economically damaging price spikes.
“This dramatically underlines the important role that emergency oil stocks continue to have today, and is a reminder that while we are making great strides to transition our energy systems to cleaner and more sustainable fuel sources, oil security still matters,” Sadamori said.
Other witnesses who appeared before the committee included Department of Energy Assistant Secretary for Fossil Energy Steven Winberg, Administrator Linda Capuano of the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Jason Bordoff of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University and Phillip Brown from the Congressional Research Service.
