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Wednesday's Energy Absurdity: Biden's Energy Department Sells Off New England's Strategic Gasoline Reserve

David Blackmon
May 22, 2024

Hey, remember in 2014, when Hurricane Sandy rolled up through the states on the Northeastern Atlantic coast, causing power outages and all sorts of infrastructure damage? Part of that damage was the disruption of gasoline supplies to that region, and caused all sorts of societal disruption for weeks afterwards.

More recently, remember when the Colonial Pipeline was hit by a cyber attack in May, 2021, just three short years ago? Remember how we found out that single pipeline supplied most of the gasoline up and down the Atlantic coast of the US, moving it thousands of miles from refineries in the Golden Triangle area of Texas?
What does the Colonial Pipeline cyber attack mean for Texas' economy? | KXAN Austin


The Hurricane Sandy event convinced congress and President Barack Obama to create a strategic gasoline reserve for the region, consisting of about 1 million barrels of gas stored underground in that region to be tapped in just such emergency situations. But congress has a very short memory, and snuck language into the $1.7 trillion budget deal passed in March that orders the Biden administration to sell off every barrel in that reserve during the current fiscal year.

The Department of Energy announced Tuesday that it will be taking bids next week from parties interested in buying the gasoline, eager to leave the northeastern states completely insecure in the event of another big storm or cyber attack.

Biden officials believe the sale will raise something around $125 million, roughly equal to the amount the federal government spends every 15 minutes or so, before expenses of holding the sale are accounted. Some experts think the sale of that 1 million barrels of gas could lower gasoline prices by a few cents per gallon for maybe a couple of days.

This isn’t just absurd - it is insane.

But don’t worry, New Englanders, you’re supposed to have forgotten about what you went through during Sandy and the Colonial outage, and hey, Old Joe’s got your back, so everything will be fine.

*sigh*

That is all.

https://blackmon.substack.com/p/wednesdays-energy-absurdity-bidens?publication_id=712558&post_id=144868558&isFreemail=true&r=rd9j8&triedRedirect=true