Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), embroiled in a high-profile re-election bid, voted against a 2022 bill that would ban the sale of emergency oil reserves overseas. Still, he expressed concern this week that U.S. energy exports are benefiting China. China.
Brown said Tuesday he supports President Biden’s recent action to suspend permits for liquefied natural gas (LNG) export projects, saying those projects could ultimately benefit China. . The comment was echoed by Brown and other more moderate voices, including Sens. Bob Casey and John Fetterman, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-Va., R-Pennsylvania), who opposed the action. He stands apart from Democratic Party members.
“My focus is on protecting workers in Ohio’s natural gas industry and manufacturers and reducing costs for all Ohioans, and I will continue to support this rule and its impact on achieving these goals. We’re reviewing it,” Brown told Politico. “We are concerned about forcing China’s state-owned industries, which consistently seek to undermine U.S. production, to use U.S. liquid natural gas as fuel.”
According to the latest federal data, only 6.7% of U.S. LNG exports go to China. Most of the exports are going to Europe, which relies on U.S. natural gas to wean itself off Russian energy amid the Ukraine war, and other Asian countries such as Japan and South Korea.
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Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) during a Senate vote at the U.S. Capitol on January 23, 2024. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc, via Getty Images)
Mr. Brown supports suspending LNG export licenses, but energy industry groups say it would harm the U.S. economy and energy security. According to the Energy Information Administration, Ohio is one of the nation’s top 10 natural gas producers, and the American Petroleum Institute estimates that the state’s energy industry supports a total of about 351,530 jobs. .
In August 2022, Mr. Brown voted against an amendment to the Inflation Control Act proposed by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas). The proposed amendment would prevent the Department of Energy (DOE) from selling petroleum products from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) to Chinese companies. Their bid was 10 times the next highest bid.
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Mr. Brown voted against the amendment, but he also joined Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nevada, Maggie Hassan, D-Georgia, Jon Ossoff, D-Georgia, and Raphael Warnock, D-Georgia, to vote against the amendment. Other Democrats also joined Republicans in voting. I agree with that. The bill ultimately failed with 56 votes, falling short of the required two-thirds majority.
President Biden last month ordered a halt to pending natural gas export projects in a surprising move. The action was supported by environmental activists who oppose fossil fuel development. (Getty Images)
“Sherrod Brown is thrilled to see Joe Biden capitulating to green energy activists and raising prices for Americans already suffering from inflation,” Philip Retzow, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said in a statement. He is happy to sit on the sidelines,” the statement said.
“Mr. Brown will soon regret his decision to run as a far-left progressive Democrat in a state that Donald Trump will easily win in November.”
Brown did not respond to requests for comment.
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Late last month, Biden ordered the DOE It will suspend pending permits for LNG export facilities while federal regulators conduct a rigorous environmental review to assess the project’s carbon footprint, which could take more than a year to complete. The action marks a major victory for activists who have been vocally calling for such a move and even threatening large-scale protests over the issue.
the president said Suspend LNG permit He added that the action was part of his broader climate change plan and that the action “sees the climate crisis for what it is: a modern-day existential threat.” However, he did not mention the importance of export restrictions to China after the measures were taken.
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm speaks at a White House press conference on November 23, 2021. The Department of Energy sold millions of barrels of emergency oil stocks to China. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)
And the Biden administration has been under pressure for the past two years to halt SPR sales to China. Overall, since taking office, Biden said the total amount stored in the SPR, which was established in the 1970s for use in times of energy supply disruptions, to combat record fuel prices that are hitting American consumers. It ordered the Department of Energy to release approximately 260 million barrels of oil. .
As part of that effort, the DOE sold at least 2 million barrels of oil from SPR to Unipec, an affiliate of state-run China Petrochemical Corporation. The first such sale was part of the 20 million barrel SPR sale awarded to eight companies in September 2021. The remaining two sales, each of 950,000 barrels of oil, took place in April 2022 and July 2022.
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“The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is designed to ensure that the United States has sufficient oil reserves in the event of an emergency,” Cruz said last year. “Under no circumstances may any portion of this stockpile be sold to the Chinese Communist Party or companies under its control.”
