WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, Rep. Burgess Owens (UT-04) co-sponsored the Save America’s Valuable Energy Act, legislation to ensure that crude from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) does not flow to companies that are headquartered in countries on the State Department’s Defense Trade Control Country Policies List, which includes Belarus, Burma, China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and Venezuela.
Additionally, the SAVE Act prevents the sale of crude from the SPR to entities headquartered in Russia. This comes after the U.S. Department of Energy in April of 2022 approved sales to Unipec America, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of China International United Petroleum and Chemical Co, better known as UNIPEC. UNIPEC is headquartered in Beijing, China.
“America’s strategic petroleum reserves are for emergencies, not to clean up President Biden’s anti-energy policies that drove prices at the pump to record highs nationwide,” said Rep. Owens. “American taxpayers expect their emergency energy reserves to benefit domestic priorities, like lowering costs for families and protecting our national security, not to be sold to adversaries like the Chinese Communist Party, where the Biden Administration sent 950,000 barrels in 2022 alone. I am proud to support the Save America’s Valuable Energy Act to stop the sale of American oil to China in its tracks, and will work hard to protect our nation’s energy security.”
The full text of the legislation is available here.
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