By Barani Krishnan

Investing.com — The Biden administration’s largest release of oil from the nation’s emergency reserve pulled crude prices down for a third time in four days, although the market still posted big quarterly gains as OPEC+ stuck to its modest monthly addition to global production.

After a session low of $104.47, London-traded was 4.2% lower at $106.50/barrel by 1:34 PM ET (1:34 GMT). Brent dropped almost 12 percent in the week to date. However, Brent was nearly up 6% in March while it rose 37% for the first quarter.

New York’s U.S. crude benchmark, WTI was traded at $102.12, down 5.3% after an intraday low close to $100.20. In March, U.S. crude oil benchmark increased almost 7% while in the first quarter it rose about 37%.

The White House announced a record release of 1.0 million barrels per day from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve over the next six months — amounting to roughly 180 million barrels — to add to crude circulating in the market.

Additionally, it stated that fees would be levied on U.S. oil companies who sit idle on their wells and make exceptional profits due to a supply shortage.

Meanwhile, OPEC+ — the 32-nation strong oil producing alliance led by Saudi Arabia and steered by Russia — approved a modest addition of 432,000 barrels per day in output for March.

Even though the world market is in deficit by anywhere between 5.0 to 6.0 million barrels per day, the alliance continues to adhere with monthly increments of approximately 400,000 bpd. This has been especially true after the U.S. ban against Russian oil and other Western sanctions which have adversely affected energy exports from Russia.

“President Biden is feeling the pressure from Americans as inflation is getting uglier and this speculated release will show the public he is trying to get gas prices down with the exception of encouraging more drilling,” said Ed Moya, analyst at online trading platform OANDA. “(But) crude prices pared losses after OPEC+ decided ‘to stay the course’ and maintained the gradual output increase strategy.”

The White House said U.S. oil drillers were ignoring the energy crunch in order to “to make extraordinary profits … without investment,” adding that one industry chief executive had acknowledged refusal to pump more oil at even $200 a barrel.

The president’s dare to energy firms on idled oil wells was “Use it or Lose It,” an administration official, speaking anonymously, told media.

“Today, President Biden is calling on Congress to make companies pay fees on wells from their leases that they haven’t used in years and on acres of public lands that they are hoarding without producing,” the White House said in a statement. “Companies that are producing from their leased acres and existing wells will not face higher fees. But companies that continue to sit on non-producing acres will have to choose whether to start producing or pay a fee for each idled well and unused acre.”

Biden authorized the release from SPR of 50,000,000 barrels in November and 30,000,000 earlier in the month in coordination with reserves that were released by countries such as China, Japan and India.

According to U.S. Energy Information Administration, the SPR held 568.3 millions barrels of oil in stock at the end March 25. With the current release plan of 180 million barrels over the next six months, the nation’s reserve could be drawn down to a third of its current size.

Biden began tapping the SPR to provide U.S. refiners with oil loaned from the reserve that they wouldn’t have to pay for but return within a stipulated period. This was done in hopes of reducing oil prices and a decrease in transactions.

Over the past weeks, 3.0 Million barrels have been released by the SPR every week. But the government’s efforts have had a negligible effect so far on prices, with refiners turning out more products than they usually do at this time of year, resulting in extraordinarily high usage that has kept prices little changed on both the crude and oil products fronts.

Media reports also indicated that Biden will likely invoke Cold War-era power to increase domestic production of crucial minerals to make electric-vehicle batteries. This is as the president focuses more on renewable energy sources in order to reduce the dependence on oil.