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House Continues Filling Oil Reserve
WASHINGTON -- The House of Representatives Tuesday voted down a measure that could have halted deliveries of oil to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The bill would have effectively put more crude oil on the market, driving down gas prices until OPEC increases its production later this year, said Rep. Ted Strickland of Lisbon, D-6th. "The Administration continues to flood the SPR at more than twice its normal level while paying record prices for the oil and contributing to the shortage in the market," said Strickland, who voted in favor of temporarily halting deposits to the SPR. "The SPR is already filled to 94 percent of its capacity. There's no defensible reason not to take this action." The motion was defeated by a vote of 230-192. "In the fall of 2000, President Clinton withdrew 30 million barrels of oil from the SPR, pushing crude oil prices down from $37 to less than $31 per barrel," Strickland noted, also pointing out that George H.W. Bush, the current president's father, stopped filling the SPR for a period in 1990 as well. "Yet this administration insists on ignoring the benefits of drawing down from the SPR while pursuing legislation its own analysts admit will do nothing to bring down gasoline prices." The Department of Energy's independent research arm, the Energy Information Administration, stated in its February 2004 analysis of the House and Senate energy bills that, "on a fuel-specific basis, changes to production, consumption, imports and prices are negligible." In other words, the House-passed energy bill will not affect the cost of fuel. President Bush has refused to stop the filling of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve or to call on the oil producing nations to significantly increase production, Strickland said. Recently, OPEC finally announced that it would raise oil output quotas next month, but only to the level they were producing this spring. The legislation put forward by Congressional Democrats also included anti-fraud provisions to prevent electricity market manipulation such as what Enron did out west in 2000, and electric reliability provisions to prevent future blackouts similar to what happened in Ohio last summer, he said. "