On Tuesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Special Report,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said that the amount of money for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in the reconciliation bill was “only a modest amount of money to grow the storage in the capacity.” And he’ll “constantly ask for more” money.
Host Bret Baier asked, [relevant exchange begins around 4:30] “Last week, you told another network you would look at creative ideas to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve…earlier this year, you were looking for $20 billion in funding for that. Congress, in the big beautiful bill, gave you $171 million. Is filling the [SPR] still a priority, and what kind of deals are you thinking about?”
Wright answered, “It is. The [SPR] is sort of a strategic asset, it’s not for commercial reasons. It’s for that bad day that might happen, you need to have it. So, there was money in the one big beautiful bill to finish the repairs to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. And there were previously slated sales, actually, that would have — so I had to buy back those sales, basically, and cancel them. But, you’re right, only a modest amount of money to grow the storage in the capacity.”
Baier then asked Wright if he will ask for more money, and Wright answered, “I’ll constantly ask for more. Yeah. We want to fill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve up. But as I said at another time on the news, there [are] other creative ways we can do it. Think of all the oil and gas underground that’s under federal lands. It may not even be under normal federal lands, special situation lands, that’s just sitting there. I think we can strike deals with entrepreneurs that are going to go in there and develop those resources and pay us in oil that we’ll put into the SPR.”
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