Should the US sell oil from the strategic reserve?

Denise Garcia
Updated
Should the US sell oil from the strategic reserve?

Not everyone is a fan of the recent lifting of the U.S. oil export ban.

"I would be very cautious for the Department of Energy to go ahead and move forward and try to sell some oil right now," said Bill Richardson, former U.S. energy secretary, in an interview with CNBC on Wednesday.

"I think that's a bad idea," he told " Power Lunch ." "You use the Strategic Petroleum Reserves in emergencies ... not when you want to affect prices."

His comments come after reports of U.S. oil being exported to Europe for the first time in 40 years. Congress lifted the ban in late 2015.

The House also mandated through the Budget Act that 5 million oil barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve be sold yearly until 2021. In this deal, the Department of Energy has been given discretionary authority to begin sales this year, and it's mandatory that sales start by 2018.

While Richardson does consider that lifting the oil export ban is favorable for geopolitical reasons, he does think that the Strategic Petroleum Reserve decision needs to be "slow[ed] down a bit," noting the current market conditions and oil glut.

In that same vein, John Kilduff, partner at Again Capital, thinks the reserve should be "doubled."

"The way things are going for our industry, we could easily find ourselves in a vulnerable position once again just like we were a few years ago, when we were inputting two-thirds of our requirements," Kilduff said Wednesday on "Power Lunch."

As analyst weighed with in their forecast of whether producers will cut output, Michael Cohen, Barclays' head of energy commodities research, believes that the chances of OPEC cutting back are highly unlikely.

"This new diplomatic tension that we are seeing between Saudi Arabia and Iran makes it even less likely," he said on "Power Lunch."

For investors still looking to bet on the energy sector, Michael Kelly, head of exploration and production research at Global Hunter Securities, points to the Permian Basin.

"The Permian ... this is the best rock," he said on "Power Lunch." "We think you get on average a 50 percent better rate of return out of the Permian versus any other play in the U.S."



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