Rather than work to boost domestic production, President Joe Biden opted to repeatedly release millions of barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to keep prices down.
US Oil & Gas Association President Tim Stewart said that the industry's production boost will help keep gas prices steady throughout 2023, a feat the private sector may manage in spite of the Biden administration.
"The three biggest economies in the world, the US, EU and China, that all seem to be slowing down simultaneously, the IMF is predicting about a third of the world to be in a recession, recessionary environment next year," he said on the Tuesday edition of the "Just the News, No Noise" television show. "And so I think the markets are beginning to price that recession into oil and gasoline prices, you know, the commodities markets are really good at, much better than the stock market at predicting the future."
"Our industry has done a really good job in raising production levels over where we were last year. And so I think we're seeing an environment here where we're gonna be pretty much stabilized over this next year," he continued. "So a couple of factors may play into it, particularly what happens with China and how quickly they reopened and what happens there, but I think we're going to be seeing prices fairly stabilized for the next few months."
"We are up 620,000 barrels over last year at this time. And what that has done is that that increased production has been able to stabilize the supply shocks that we saw in early 2022," Stewart continued. "I think the industry deserves far more credit than the administration's willing to give us. The reality is, we've done this in spite of them. This in spite of every regulatory roadblock that they have put up so far, and we anticipate many more coming in this next year."
Gas prices have surged this year amid industry uncertainty over the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The crunch was further complicated by production cuts from OPEC+, which the bloc enacted despite the protests of the Biden administration.
