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“STRATEGIC PETROLEUM RESERVE” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Energy was published in the Senate section on pages S7905 on Nov. 10, 2015.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
STRATEGIC PETROLEUM RESERVE
Ms. MURKOWSKI. Mr. President, I come to the floor this evening to talk about two issues that are of particular importance to me. When most look at me now, they think about energy and more typically about Alaskan energy. I am not going to disappoint tonight. I would like to speak to that, but I would also like to speak this evening about the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the SPR. We have been talking about it a lot of late. It has been viewed as a source of revenue--a pay-for, if you will--with certain measures that we have seen of late, whether it be the transportation measure that we have in front of us, the budget deal that was executed a couple weeks ago, or other measures.
I want to take a few minutes this evening to talk about the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. I will start by first addressing what I will call the flagship SPR. It is the very important stuff, if you will, within the Reserve, and that is the crude oil. I call this the flagship because there are five product petroleum reserve sites in the Northeast. We have product reserve sites for gasoline, distillate, and home heating oil, but these are relatively small reserve sites. There are about 2 million barrels total. I think their effectiveness is probably more controversial. But the flagship SPR is truly--when we think about the impact, the import to our economy and to a level of stability, the flagship Strategic Petroleum Reserve occupies giant underground caverns along the gulf coast.
I had the opportunity to visit the site of one of our Strategic Petroleum Reserves. It holds some 695 million barrels, and they are ready to cover our Nation's net imports for several months if global energy markets should spiral out of control.
The comforting reality about these flagship SPRs is that, through thick and thin, these reserves are rarely ever tapped. They have offered a measure of security and stability that I think is unique in the history of global commerce.
Amid higher levels of domestic production and lower levels of imports, a number of reforms are being considered for the SPR by the Department of Energy now. There has been a lot of discussion. There is a study underway by the DOE, and a discussion about upgrading the distribution capacity of the SPR is underway, and it clearly has merit.
The North American energy landscape has changed so quickly and so dramatically that the volume of oil we can pump out of the Reserve is greater and potentially much greater than the volume of oil we can actually move to refineries. This is something we need to understand and study more, but it is something that--we have congested waterways, we can look at reversed pipelines and so on, ways that we can figure out how we can move this oil more readily if we so need it.
In the measure we have just executed with the budget proposal, there is funding set aside for Strategic Petroleum Reserve maintenance and life extension, hopefully for marine terminals, but effectively recognizing that we need to make sure that our SPR actually functions as it is intended. That study is underway. We will learn more, hopefully in the spring, but the imperative to have a functioning, workable SPR is one that goes to national security, really, from an overall stability argument. I remain opposed to suggestions by some that we should use the Reserve to pay for completely unrelated programs or that we simply sell off the entire stockpile, as some have suggested.
As I wrote in my July report of this year called ``A Turbulent World,'' we have drawn down SPR only on a limited number of occasions. In the entire history of the Reserve itself, only approximately 166 million barrels have ever left the storage sites for any reasons. So 166 barrels have been sold off over the course of the life of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for exchanges, emergencies, tests, deficit reductions. Everything that we have ever done that has involved a sale of the SPR totals just about 166 million barrels. That is this graph over here.
Over here are the new proposed sales to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. If we add up the barrels this Congress--the 114th Congress--
has already committed to sell for SPR modernization, the Bipartisan Budget Act, the DRIVE Act, the Transportation bill, and then a bill over on the House side, the 21st Century Cures Act, we are looking at a total of 279 million barrels to be sold off. That is 40 million for SPR modernization, 58 million for the Bipartisan Budget Act, 21st Century Cures Act is 80 million, and the highway bill is 101 million. We would be selling off 279 million barrels total. Think about that--in the entire life of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, 166 million barrels sold off. In one Congress, what we are proposing is 279 million barrels. It is quite eye-catching.
These numbers matter. The SPR is designed to provide 90 days of net import protection. It is a pretty simple math equation we are dealing with. If we import more, we need more in storage; if we import less, we need less. Currently, net imports are about 5 million barrels per day. Therefore, the bare minimum we need in storage is 450 million barrels. So if we execute all of the sales the 114th Congress has either approved or is considering, we dip below the bare minimum that is required--the 450 million barrels--by the end of the 10-year window. I am going to be releasing another report on the cumulative impact of all these sales on the integrity of the Reserve, so we should be seeing that in a few days.
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