IV Team Biden and the First $3 Billion SPR Oil Heist
In this section, we will take a brief step back from the Iran War and expose a few uncomfortable facts about another war the US has been covertly and overtly fighting for the past 12 years – namely the US war against Russia being waged by the US puppet government in Ukraine. It is not possible to fully understand the US War against Iran without a better understanding of the US War against Russia.
Both wars involved “proxies” the War Machine can blame when things go bad. For the war against Iran, the proxy is Isreal. For the war against Russia, the proxy is Ukraine. Both wars are based on an attempt to control oil – either Russian Oil or Iranian Oil. Both wars were started by the US despite the fact that there was no way the US could defeat either Russia or Iran. Despite losing both wars, the War Machine has made billions and even trillions of dollars – and that was and still is the real point of both wars.
Here is a brief summary of the US war against Russia. In February, 2014, highly paid US operatives, including Joe Biden’s son Hunter, overthrew the elected government of Ukraine. These operatives then spent several years pretending to negotiate with Russia – just like the current US government is pretending to negotiate with Iran. But what the US backed puppet government was really doing was spending hundreds of billions of US tax payer dollars building up a massive army to attack Russia.
Several areas in Eastern and Southern Ukraine are home to people, 90 percent of whom speak Russian and attend Russia churches. US backed neo-nazi Ukrainian puppets passed numerous laws preventing these Russians from speaking their own native language and attending their own Russian Churches.
During the important months before Russia finally “invaded” Ukraine, the Russians were trying to negotiate a deal whereby the rights of the Russian speaking people in the Donbas, or Eastern third of Ukraine, would be protected. It was only after Team Biden refused to negotiate that the Russians realized that a military offensive was their only hope of protecting the Russian speaking people in the Donbas.
The US then used the Russian offensive as an excuse to increase oil sanctions against Russia. These sanctions led to a reduction of Russian oil on the world market of about 4 MB per day (much less than the current Iranian War reduction). The US blocking of Russian oil trigger an oil shortage which led to an increase in oil prices in the US in 2022.
In January 2021, when Biden took office, there were 638 MB of oil in the SPR. Team Biden immediately started releasing oil from the SPR in an attempt to lower gas prices. By November, there was 600 MB of oil left. 38 MB of oil had been released in the previous 10 months. Then, from November 2021 to April 2022, the pace of the drawdown increased. By April 1, 2022, there was only 548 MB in the SPR. 20 MB of oil had been sold in six months plus another 32 MB of oil was “loaned” to oil corporations – but has still never been returned.
On March 31, 2022, Team Biden announced a 180-million-barrel drawdown from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), with deliveries beginning in May 2022 and auctioning off one million barrels a day for 180 days (7 MB a week).
For each sale, the Energy Department announces the type and amount of oil from the four SPR sites that will be auctioned in a competitive bidding process. By law, the contracts are awarded to the companies that make the highest bids, and any company that is registered in the SPR’s Crude Oil Sales Offer Program is eligible to make an offer. These daily oil auctions concluded with the final auctions in November 2022. This was followed by an additional 15 million barrels in December 2022.
The EIA reported an SPR crude balance of 371.6M barrels at the end of Jan. 6. 2023 This closed the chapter on 220M barrels taken from the emergency oil reserve since November 2021 by the Biden administration. Of this 220 MB, 32 MB was from a “loan” contracted and awarded in November 2021 and delivered in early 2022.
The Biden administration claimed that this loan would generate a 9% guaranteed return to taxpayers essentially with no risk, when borrowed barrels were “returned to the SPR” in 2023.
Below is a comparison of the oil auction results compared to the oil loan results. Here are the SPR auction results:
Note that the SPR auction price was over $100 per barrel. Here are the loan results:
Note that the return periods for the SPR oil loans extended all the way to 2024 but still have not been returned as of August 2026.
What happened when Biden “loaned” 32 million barrels of oil to oil corporations – and how much did that fiasco cost us?
On November 23, 2021, Biden announced the release of 50 million barrels of oil from the SPR. Of these 50 million barrels, 32 million barrels were a “loan”, releasing oil that was supposed to be eventually returned to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. But Biden repeatedly delayed "the return of about 15 million barrels of the borrowed oil to the SPR until 2026," reports market firm Argus.
Here are quotes from this September 5, 2024 report:
“President Biden has delayed by up to two years a requirement for oil companies to return 15 million barrels of crude that have been loaned out from the SPR. DOE had loaned the crude using an "exchange," under which companies agree to return the crude to the SPR at a later date, along with an in-kind payment in exchange for the loan. But over the last two months, DOE has modified at least 9 contracts with ExxonMobil, Shell and other companies that had borrowed the crude, delaying the return of 15 million barrels of the borrowed crude to the SPR until October of 2026. Delaying the return will free up crude that would otherwise have been injected into the SPR in June-September, 2024, during the peak of the summer driving season.”
Here is a graph of oil prices from the time of the loan to today:
SPR oil was loaned to Shell in February 2022 when the price was about $75 per barrel. Shell could have returned the oil in 2025 when the price was about $65 per barrel. But it did not. The revised contracts will delay the return of "all remaining exchange oil" until July to October 2026. Here is a graph at the end of the article:
The two main companies were Exxon Mobil and Phillips 66. They were loaned 32 million barrels and paid back 17 million barrels. But they still own 15 million barrels.
While oil is currently under $90 a barrel, within a few weeks, it is likely to go over $100 a barrel and remain that way for years to come. At a price of $100 a barrel, they owe $1.5 billion that will likely never be paid back.
This explains why “Lucky” oil companies have been willing to borrow the oil from the SPR. They know that they will never have to pay it back! Meanwhile, we tax payers lost $1.5 billion the last time one of our Presidents loaned out oil. But that is a drop in the oil bucket compared to what we are going to lose this time.
Trump did have another less corrupt option. In 2022, Biden ordered the sale of 180 million barrels of oil from the reserve in response to the war in Ukraine. Biden directed DOE to sell 1 million barrels of crude oil per day for 6 months by way of a silent auction with the oil going to the highest bidding oil company each day. But instead of an auction, Trump decided to loan the oil to his buddies.