Biden just sold the National Helium Reserve…

I predict 10 years from now, the Democrats may even make the sale of helium for balloons illegal, if the country finds itself facing a crisis shortage of helium.

It's normal in their mentality to require all the people to make sacrifices for the greater good and ban something to try to address a problem.

 

Well of course gas from our Strategic Petroleum Reserves were being sold, those reserves were literally created as a part of an international trade agreement to meet our commerce obligations. As for selling off our entire reserves, I'm not really sure what you are talking about, that has not happened. In fact, in recent months we've been adding to our reserves

 

The problem is, the Biden Administration did not later refill it, or they have barely refilled it, to be more totally accurate. Even after the price went down.
The current level of the Strategic Petroleum Reserves, as of January 2024, is only 357.4 M.

It was 617.77 M on October 1, 2021.
372.28 M on December 30, 2022.
349.54 M on September 7, 2023.

 

I believe that most news has an agenda and so to try and be informed as best I can, I try to obtain news from a number of sources including both so called right and left wing news. If I learn something negative about Biden or something negative about the actions of an Executive Branch agency from right leaning news should I just disregard it?

Your question about government involvement in the Helium market is an excellent question with respect to this thread, since the purpose of any strategic reserve is in part to allow the government to moderate/modulate market price by selling some amount of the resource if need-be to impactr market price That capability is now gone.

I would agree that a lot of posts are from what you term blind partisans, but there must be some people here that do not align all of their opinions to the two party dichotomy.

 

Fuel is sold from the reserves when the market is unable to keep up with demand on its own, usually due to a sudden natural disaster or international conflict. It goes without saying that fuel was sold from our reserves during that time, because that's literally the intended purpose of why we created those reserves to begin with. What I am trying to better understand from you is

1. Why you believe we should not use those reserves for its intended purpose, which again is to be sold when the market is unable to meet demand
2. Where on earth you heard we are selling off our entire reserves

Production was at it's lowest point of the 21st century in 2020, but this was due to a sudden decline in demand, which was caused by a little international incident called COVID.. perhaps you've heard of it?... anyway, in 2021 and 2022 demand recovered substantially.. so much so that production was unable to keep up with global demand. In 2023 fuel production reached it's highest point in history, and the market was finally able to keep up with demand. If you are seriously of the opinion that we should not have been selling from our reserves during that time in between, then I really don't know what else to say. That's an illogical point of view, and defeats the purpose of why we created the reserves to begin with

and no, we are definitely not selling our entire reserves, we are adding to our reserves and preparing for whatever hiccups in the market the future may hold. Because that's the logical thing to do

 

And once again that parasitic name jumps up..

How Does the U.S. Government Use the Strategic Petroleum Reserve?

The ticks are sucking us dry..

 

Why do we have a helium reserve?

I mean, I'm sure there's a good reason, but I can't for the life of me think of what strategic value helium has that we would need to maintain a reserve. If we can't get helium, what happens?

 

The error in this analysis (aside from being out of date) is it seems to be focusing exclusively on domestic use of energy and energy imports, without addressing the fact that the reserves were actually first created as part of an international agreement with our trading partners as a means of assuring we will always meet our trade obligations. We are always capable of preventing domestic supply shock by cutting our exports and emphasizing our production on selling energy at home, but the whole reason we created the reserves to begin with is so we do not have to cut our exports, thus assuring our trading partners that we will continue to meet our trade obligations. That assurance is what makes us a more desirable trading partner to our allies

As for the notion we are running those reserves dry, the first thing to note is our biggest period of selling out of our reserves supply was the initial demand recovery of 2021 going into 2022. Since then the market has caught up significantly to demand to the point that we are now adding to our reserves again.

To say that an article from over a year ago is not up to date with the current energy market situation would be a vast understatement

 

Depends on what has changed in that year.. Has the reserve been replaced?

 

To my knowledge, the He reserve was established because He was used in blimps for military purposes. Initially, they used hydrogen, but because this is VERY flammable (see the Hindenburg), it was replaced by He.

Currently, this is the use of He:



The only uses of national strategic interests would be cryogenics (for example in MRI machines), welding and controlled atmospheres (i.e. oxygen free). We use liquid He in my department for our NMR machines. For MRI, each machine uses about 1500 liters of liquid He. The modern machines recycle the liquid He that boils off, but I don't know how efficient that process is, my guess is that they still have to be topped off every once in a while. Of course, with the increased use of MRI as a diagnostic tool, it is likely that liquid He use for cryogenics will further increase.

Does that require the existence of a strategic reserve? I don't know. Why doesn't the US, for example, have a strategic reserve of ventilators? They could have been very useful in early 2020. There are lots of useful things that could be in a reserve that aren't. Of course, that's not the issue behind this thread. The mindset is to just bash Biden, no matter how.

 

I've yet to see Joe do anything that could be described as being in the best interest of the nation. A mistake is a misjudgment. A string of mistakes is incompetence. A total history of mistakes implies intent, and the motives highly questionable.

Biden, or the people controlling him, buy votes as a means of holding power. But every dollar the government gives away, wastes or loses- is a taxpayer dollar. The duty of leadership is to the people- but especially those who pay the bills and keep the system afloat. Those entrusted with taxpayer dollars have a primary duty to respect that trust, and return value that serves the nation for every dollar they spend.
Joe obviously thinks taxpayers dollars are free of any duty or obligation, because he totally ignores it.

 

What has changed is our reserve supply is no longer decreasing, but increasing. In other words, the exact opposite of being sucked dry. It should also be noted that production has since reached a new all time high as well.

 

Tell me you didn’t read the thread, without telling me you didn't read the thread

 

You should have stopped at “i didn’t know”

The “emergency gasoline reserve” sale was proposed and voted on by congress……wait for it….wait for it…..By the REPUBLICAN Congress in 2023 !!!!!

They ALSO wrote and voted into law many sales of oil from the SPR. That was shown in other threads here on PF

You should read up on these things before you post

 

Cool, how much has been replaced from draw off?

Let's see.. We were at 712 million barrels "historic level" and we're current at 355 million barrels, actually down from 2020/23.

WING AND PRAYER, is how this Government provides us with..

 

I didn't read the response after the OP that clarified what was happening, and posted as such after that first post of mine.

 

That’s because global demand was at its lowest point of the century in 2020. We always refill our reserves when demand is low, because that is when it is cheapest to do so. However, we do not always sell from our reserves when demand is high. It is only when our exporting companies are unable to keep up with market demand that we sell from our reserves

The reserves are essentially a form of insurance for our exporting companies to use when there is a significant disruption in production and the market, such as a hurricane, or a pandemic. If we do not sell from our reserves during that period, then we are failing at using those reserves for their intended purpose, and we’re basically wasting money and decreasing our market value as a trading partner

Where we are currently, the market is healthy, and production is at an all time high. The need to sell from our resources has passed, so we are now refilling our reserves again, in preparation for any major disruption in the future

 

Interesting, have any idea why dem congress cut that out of the 2 trillion stimulus bill in 2020 when oil was dirt cheap?

 

I can see why it be more important to China then us

 

did Trump also sell off some of our Helium reserve?

 

2017

"Trump Proposes Selling Off Half U.S. Strategic Oil Reserve"

https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/...elling-off-half-the-u-s-strategic-oil-reserve

 

The proposal in March was to add $3 billion to the Department of Energy's budget for the purpose of refilling our reserves, however in the coming months after, demand for oil would drop so low that the reserves were still refilled by substantial amounts without the additional $3 billion in funds. In fact, the reserves were filled by the largest amount seen in over 30 years, which is going all the way back to when its infrastructure was still being build

 

I guess I'm missing some key points.. if we could have topped off the SPR in 2020 as you suggest, in times of low prices, then why did congress strip it from the stimulus pac..

Now we sit around 357 million and higher prices to replenish.. I suppose padding fuel prices at the expense of national security is more important under this administration. Does fall in line with current immigration debacle.

 

Well for starters, the Department of Energy did not find it necessary to add any more than 30 million barrels to our reserves in 2020 to remain cost effective, not to mention topping our reserves off. Since the early 2000s we've been downgrading the capacity of our reserves as it becomes less cost effective. Some are even advocating for getting rid of the reserves entirely.

As is, we remain a net exporter of oil, production is at an all time high, and global demand is expected to hit it's all time peak around 2030. After that we're expected to see a permanent decline in oil demand. Realistically speaking, we only need to store enough oil in our reserves to offset any disruptions in the market. With 196 countries now pledging to reduce their oil dependency, topping off our reserves to meet our trade obligations is not necessary, or financially practical

 

I guess, but simple math begs topping off 370 million in 2020 would have put us at better position today and needing to refill 650ish million barrel at todays prices.. But as peaceful as the world is today, I doubt we will experience any supply shortages in the near future