First, let me say I totally applaud the decision. It will hurt, yes, but it is totally the right thing to do. But we do need to fill the gap it will create, especially for our Euro partners. How will we do that? Simple: Increase US production again.
WHICH brings me to a few points and “fact checks” to toss out there. First, a point: Again, the president was behind and not out in front on this issue. Presidents lead, they do not follow. That doesn’t appear to be the case time and time again with Mr. Biden. Here we are again: The White House asked the congress to kill a GOP bill to ban Russian oil and increase US production last week. Remember? 220 Dems ALL voted against it last week, including our illustrious Colorado ones (nice job, electorate…). But this week the bill is emerging yet again – this time in the Senate – where Lindsay Graham lit up a bill and has, of all people, Chuck Schumer, on board. And the GOP in the House are also lighting that bill again this week, with Nancy Pelosi saying the same thing – ban their oil. Net net: Joe was in a corner; he had to announce the ban.
Now – last week Joe dispatched people to Venezuela to look into making a deal with Maduro to get oil. Seriously? There was so much bi-partisan pushback that hopefully that has gone quiet now. Even Dem Senator Menendez was all “WTH are you doing?” But yes, Joe sent feelers out to the Saudis, the Venezuelans, and the Iranians, all last week. OMG.
Now onto the fact check: Yesterday Psaki went after the “9,000 approved leases” for exploration and the big oil companies, like they are the bad guys in all of this. She also spent time talking about the “record production” that is happening here since Joe took office. Then Joe today, in his address announcing the ban, spoke at length of the “facts” that we produced record oil here in 2021, and are on track to break that record in 2022. Okay – FACT CHECK – not true, at least according to the US Energy Information Administration (www.EIA.gov) – which several in the media are calling out (probably not the media a lot of you are watching, of course). Go look it up! Just to help you out, the US hit record production in 2019 with 4.485B barrels produced. Since then we fell, and continued to fall today, by 10% and declining. It’s right there, in black and white. The information the White House is putting out there is totally incorrect. Totally. Another quick fact check: Those 9,000 so-called “approved leases” were mostly done prior to Trump leaving office (a big flurry of them, in fact), but among Biden’s first moves in his first few days was a return to massive regulatory and permitting hurdles, making them even more expensive and risky. Didn’t tell us all that, either.
And let’s talk imports to the US: Globally, we hit a high of 3.7B barrels imports in 2017, as the US was starting to unleash production. We dropped that number, by 2020, to 2.87B. We dropped imports to us by over 22%! And now we’re back up to 3.1B and climbing. See a trend yet? Again – right there, in black and white, on the US GOVERNMENT Energy site. (Somebody go tell those people feeding Joe his data that they need to either fix it, or muzzle the EIA so we can’t all know the truth…)
And NOW let’s talk exports to our partners and allies: Again, from the US Government data, EIA.gov, it’s right there. Here are the highlights: In 2016 we exported 216M barrels of crude. After we unleashed production, we exported 1.173B barrels. Doing the math, that’s a 543% increase! Really, go ahead .. do the math. It’s okay. We all know already. But of course, as we engaged in the Biden war on fossil energy, we started dropping in 2021 and are still on the decline; 7% drop last year and accelerating as we speak.
Now, I will tell you that Natural Gas production does continue to increase – each year since at least 2016 it has gone up, to where we are almost double our output from 2016. If Biden wants to tout that increase, he is correct. But the reason for the increase isn’t due to him – it exploded (so to speak) under the last administration.
Those of you doing the “net exporter” math that was so widely proclaimed by the last admin, let me help you out: Leading up to, and including, 2019, we were a net importer of oil, but the gap was quickly narrowing. By late 2019 we actually flipped the ratios and began net exporting, which held and widened in 2020, and even in early 2021… however, it should be noted that you can see a sharp decline in that import/export margin in 2021. A 233M barrel surplus in 2020 was reduced by almost 75% in just a year, to a 60M barrel surplus, as US production started being slashed.
Those are the REAL numbers, folks. I am amazed that the Administration is actually saying what they are saying, when the real data is right there in front of those of us that choose to verify.
