Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, who is locked in a toss-up re-election bid, expressed concern this week about U.S. energy exports benefiting China despite voting against a bill in 2022 that would have prohibited the sale of emergency oil reserves to China.
Brown remarked on Tuesday that he supported President Biden’s recent actions pausing permitting for liquefied natural gas (LNG) export projects, saying those projects could ultimately benefit China. The comments separate Brown from other more moderate Democrats, including Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Pennsylvania senators Bob Casey and John Fetterman, who opposed the actions.
“My focus is on protecting Ohio workers in the natural gas industry and manufacturers and lowering costs for all Ohioans, and I continue to review this rule and the impact it would have on achieving those goals,” Brown told Politico. “I have concerns around letting American liquid natural gas fuel China’s state-sponsored industries that consistently try to undermine American production.”
According to the most recent federal data, just 6.7% of U.S. LNG exports are shipped to China. The vast majority of exports are sent to Europe, which has relied on U.S. natural gas to wean itself off Russian energy amid the Ukraine war, and other Asian countries like Japan and South Korea.
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Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, during Senate votes in the U.S. Capitol Jan. 23, 2024. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
While Brown supports a pause on LNG export permits, energy industry associations have argued it will harm the U.S. economy and energy security. According to the Energy Information Administration, Ohio is among the nation’s top 10 natural gas producers, and American Petroleum Institute estimates suggest the state’s energy industry supports roughly 351,530 total jobs.
In August 2022, Brown voted against an Inflation Reduction Act amendment offered by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, which would have blocked the Department of Energy (DOE) from selling petroleum products from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) to Chinese entities unless their bid was 10 times higher than the next highest bid received.
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While Brown voted against the amendment, other Democrats, including senators Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., and Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., joined Republicans in voting in favor of it. The bill ultimately failed after receiving 56 votes in favor, failing to reach the required two-thirds majority.
President Biden ordered pending natural gas export projects to be halted in a stunning move last month. The action was cheered by environmentalists who oppose fossil fuel development. (Getty Images)
“Sherrod Brown is happy to stand by as Joe Biden caves to green energy activists and drives up prices for Americans already struggling with inflation,” Philip Letsou, a spokesperson for the National Republican Senate Committee, told Fox News Digital in a statement.
“Brown will quickly regret his decision to run as a far-left progressive Democrat in a state Donald Trump will handily win in November.”
Brown didn’t respond to a request for comment.
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Late last month, Biden ordered the DOE to pause pending permits for LNG export facilities while federal officials conduct a rigorous environmental review assessing the projects’ carbon emissions, which could take more than a year to complete. The action represents a major victory for activists who have loudly called for such a move, even threatening to hold large protests over the issue.
The president said the pause on LNG permitting was a part of his sweeping climate agenda, adding the action “sees the climate crisis for what it is: the existential threat of our time.” However, he didn’t mention the importance of restricting exports to China after taking the action.
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm speaks during a White House press briefing Nov. 23, 2021. The Department of Energy has sold millions of barrels of emergency oil stocks to China. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images))
And the Biden administration has faced pressure over the last two years to stop SPR sales to China. Overall, Biden has ordered the DOE to release a total of about 260 million barrels of oil stored in the SPR, which was established in the 1970s to be used in times of energy supply disruptions, since taking office to combat record fuel prices hitting American consumers.
As part of that effort, the DOE sold at least 2 million barrels of oil from the SPR to Unipec, an affiliate of the state-controlled China Petrochemical Corporation. The first such sale was part of a 20-million-barrel SPR sale awarded to eight companies in September 2021. The other two — both sales for 950,000 barrels of oil — came in April 2022 and July 2022.
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“The Strategic Petroleum Reserve was intended to ensure that America had sufficient oil reserves in the event of an emergency,” Cruz said last year. “Under no circumstances should we sell any part of this stockpile to the Chinese Communist Party or any company under its control.”