With President Joe Biden’s release of another 15 million barrels, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve will be drawn down to its lowest levels since 1984. The United States is vulnerable to another oil crisis. The data suggest that another energy crunch is coming in late 2023.
One challenge is that U.S. oil production, rather than increasing, as the Energy Information Administration had predicted, has plateaued. The weekly domestic oil production data from the EIA continue to show U.S. crude oil production at or around 12 million barrels a day. Since June 2022, production has flat-lined. U.S. production is running 400,000 barrels a day below the EIA’s projections of just six months ago. There is a risk that without a pivot by the Biden administration in its war against domestic fossil fuel energy, the U.S. shale revolution could be ending prematurely. And global oil markets are already supply-constrained. Existing spare capacity is largely controlled by Saudi Arabia, whose paranoid and prideful leader Biden has further alienated.
