Biden demands oil companies help bring relief at the pump, drawing industry criticism

US President Joe Biden said Oct. 26 said he was hard at work to ensure that lower oil prices are reflected in the price Americans pay for fuel at the pump, again calling on oil companies to heed his word to pass on savings to consumers – a move that drew ire from the oil industry.

Biden's remarks came as part of a public address otherwise focused on cutting costs to American families through the elimination of junk fees, those unavoidable, surprise charges across an array of industries, from banking to ticket processing, that the administration said inflate costs for families while providing little to no value or service.

Biden noted that the price of gasoline was down for the third week in a row and down $1.25/gal from the beginning of the summer, with "the most common price right now in America [at] $3.39/gal."

"We're making serious progress in getting prices close to what they were before the pandemic," he said. "And they're going to come down even further when the oil companies agree to my demand to pass on the savings from the price of a barrel of oil, which is considerably down, to the pump."

Earlier in the month, Biden laid out a three-step plan for lowering fuel costs that involved a call for oil companies to pass savings on to consumers as well as a readiness to release more crude from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and desire to responsibly increase US oil production without delaying or deferring the transition to clean energy.

Industry pushback

But the oil industry has repeatedly said that Biden administration policies have stifled domestic production and taken exception to Democratic efforts to shift the blame for high fuel prices to oil companies.

"With energy costs and geopolitical instability around the world continuing to rise, it's time for Washington to focus on leveraging American energy production to confront the global mismatch between energy demand and available supply that has driven fuel prices higher," a spokesperson for the American Petroleum Institute said in an email.

American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers President and CEO Chet Thompson offered that Biden was simply "wrong."

"Refiners do not set the prices consumers pay at the pump or the prices for crude oil," Thompson said. Rather, global supply and demand sets the value of fuel products, and "those fundamentals are outside of our control."

Thompson contended that US refiners have been running their facilities to maximize gasoline, diesel and jet fuel supplies available to meet global demand. He said finished fuel prices reflect not only crude but other inputs, including labor, electricity and transportation, which he said were all more expensive than oil.

"Complicating matters further, more than 3 million barrels of refining capacity has closed around the world since the start of the pandemic," Thompson said. "Policies and anti-fuel rhetoric, including from this administration, bear some of the responsibility for why it's unnecessarily more expensive to manufacture gasoline and diesel in the US."