Protecting America's Strategic Petroleum Reserve From China Act

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. GUTHRIE. Mr. Speaker, I just want to clarify, Russia and Iran-- well, Iran is part of OPEC, so they are not the ones buying out of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. As a matter of fact, President Biden went to OPEC to ask them to increase their production instead of doing American oil.

Mr. Speaker, I also want to say, 2015--to finish the sentence--it was a Republican controlled Congress in 2015, it was also the Obama administration worked together in a bipartisan way to unleash American energy or give them a worldwide market for American energy, and when you threw in President Trump's administration and a regulatory environment that made sense, we had record production of energy. We did ship it throughout the world. We also had record low prices here in America.

The problem we are facing today is because of President Biden and the Democrats in Congress' war on American oil. That is the problem we are here to address.

The price of gasoline hit over $5 a gallon in the height of this war on oil, $4.80 a gallon in Kentucky when it was just over $2.20 when President Biden took office. American families are hurting because of this, small business owners are hurting because of this, and they continue to struggle.

Instead of taking action to meaningfully unleash America's energy potential, President Biden opted to release supplies from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. What we need to do is get back to unleashing American energy, not sending out of our Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

Even worse, President Biden's abuse of our Strategic Petroleum Reserve has reduced our stockpile by more than 250 million barrels, jeopardizing our ability to respond to supply disruptions posed by natural disasters and other true emergencies. This includes selling millions of barrels of oil from our Strategic Petroleum Reserve to adversarial countries, including China.

By prohibiting our strategic reserves from being sold to China, this legislation is a significant step toward restoring our energy security and providing needed relief for hardworking Americans.

We have the ability to produce, we need to move forward, and we need to ban SPR from going to China and we need to move forward on American energy.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source