NC Wisconsin News

Gas prices across the country continue to climb even after President Joe Biden recently moved to release up to 180 million barrels of crude oil from the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve, with gas prices now reaching their highest levels in decades.

“There’s little, if any, good news about fuel prices heading into summer, and the problem could become worse should we see an above average hurricane season, which could knock out refinery capacity at a time we badly need it as refined product inventories continue to plummet,” Patrick De Haan, head of Petroleum Analysis at GasBuddy, said in a press release.

Biden made his oil release announcement back on March 31, adding that there would be a slight delay in declining gas prices by days and weeks, but the prices would drop by an unknown range. "It could come down fairly significantly. It could come down [to] a better part of anything from 10 cents to 35 cents a gallon, it’s unknown at this point,” he added in a video posted to YouTube.

Currently, the national average is up 20 cents at $4.42 per gallon from the day of the announcement and in Wisconsin, the state average of $4.20 per gallon has climbed 20 cents over the last week alone, prompting critics to charge the Biden administration can’t seem to get out of its own way in addressing the issue. Prices are the highest in northern Wisconsin, with some counties seeing prices as high as $4.40 per gallon.

“There’s little, if any, good news about fuel prices heading into summer, and the problem could become worse should we see an above average hurricane season, which could knock out refinery capacity at a time we badly need it as refined product inventories continue to plummet" De Haan added.

While White House officials continue to insist domestic production is now at historic levels, Energy Information Administration (EIA) data paints a different picture, establishing that oil production across the country has been on the decline for three consecutive months.

EIA’s pushback comes after Interior Secretary Deb Haaland recently claimed during a congressional hearing that production is essentially higher than it’s been in decades.

“On the federal lands, we’re doing what we need to do and we’re following the law and making sure that we are moving those issues forward,” she added.

Shortly after taking office, The Hill reports Biden signed off on an executive order to freeze all new oil and gas leasing on federal lands. Since then, the administration has canceled several oil leases, including oil and gas lease sales in Alaska's Cook Inlet and the Gulf of Mexico. The lease in Alaska was slated to cover more than 1 million acres.