Newly sworn-in Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) has been in the U.S. Senate for three weeks and he’s moving forward with his first legislative package, which is focused on expanding U.S. energy production and cross-border energy permits.
“It is not Washington, D.C., that creates jobs,” Mullin told NTD. “Washington, D.C., is to create an environment for entrepreneurs and job creators to create jobs. It’s also not Washington, D.C.’s position—and it shouldn’t be their position—to choose the products, choose the industry. That is a consumer that makes those decisions.”
US Doesn’t Need to Tap Strategic Oil Reserves: Mullin
President Joe Biden repeatedly withdrew oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) throughout 2022 as gas prices rose throughout the year.Mullin said the Biden administration timed withdrawals from the SPR as a ploy to lower gas prices before the 2022 midterms.
“They used the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, SPR, which is supposed to be for national security emergency purposes, for a political ploy,” Mullin said.
“We’re at the lowest level we’ve been since 1984, yet we’re at a very volatile time around the world,” Mullin said. “We see the aggressiveness of [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and we see the aggressiveness of China, and we’re at the lowest level we’ve been. And what we’re saying is, ‘Listen, you’re playing games using the SPR for something that it wasn’t supposed to be used for, you’re using it to bring down gas prices.’”
Mullin said withdrawing oil from the SPR wouldn’t be necessary with higher domestic oil production.
“Underneath the Trump administration, we became a net [oil] exporter. We were exporting nearly a million barrels per day underneath Trump. Today, we’re importing that same amount,” Mullin said. “So we don’t have to tap our strategic oil or strategic petroleum reserves.”
“All we had to do is let the [oil] industry go,” he added.
In a Monday press conference, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said the bill “would not offer any tangible benefits to the American people” and would instead “interfere with our ability to be responsive to release oil during an international emergency, helping Putin’s war aims.”
Keystone XL Cancellation Was ‘Political’
As one of his bills would reform how cross-border oil and natural gas lines are built, Mullin spoke out on the Biden administration’s decision to cancel the Keystone XL pipeline project.Mullin said Biden revoked the Keystone XL pipeline permits “for nothing more than political reasons, not national security interests.”
Mullin said the current authority that the president has to approve cross-border energy pipelines can create complications for the companies working to build the pipelines.
“If you’re an investor and you’re looking at the Keystone pipeline, and say a next administration comes in—say Trump comes back in and he approves the Keystone pipeline—well, you’re going to get four years for it to be approved. So you’re going to invest billions of dollars knowing that the next president that comes in can reject that permit just like Biden did? And all of sudden you have all this material that was already on the ground and in the ground ... and then some of it already dug, that you’re just going to stop the project?” Mullin said.
Mullin said if the United States wants to attract energy investors who could create thousands of jobs with new energy construction projects, it will need to change the permitting process so that years of work to gather permits and prepare for construction aren’t canceled as they were under Biden’s order.