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Chart of strategic reserve levels since 1982, for context
https://en.macromicro.me/charts/41674/us-strategic-petroleum...
Yikes.
That is just mind boggling.
Beware the Y axis not starting at 0. But it's still an insane drop.
Though note that, for some reason, the last 250M barrels are not physically extractable from the SPR, and the red line has dropped to 284M.
Source on that? Not doubting, just curious. If true that explains the Y axis starting there.
The "for some reason" is that the caverns the oil is stored in are expected to become geologically unstable if they are emptied below a certain threshold. Extract below the 250 mark, and run the risk that they will collapse and cannot be refilled.
It looks like it started to plummet in April 2022, which was on Biden's watch (disclaimer: I voted for him). It apparently was in response to supply chain shocks spiking oil prices due to the start of the war in Ukraine.
Having the AI summarize the pros and cons of that action has valid points on both sides. But in his defense, that particular war was not of our doing, unlike the current war with Iran which was initiated impulsively.
Trump spoke about this publicly, promising he would "fill the reserves right up to the top", then when in power, didn't do that but instead started a war with Iran while the reserves were still low.
It's mind boggling how stupid it all is.
:s/it all/he
Selling oil out of the SPR is the new One Weird Trick Military Planners Hate! Biden was a generally fine president, but pulling oil out of the SPR to balance the budget was an extremely ugly way to do it, and hopefully that loophole gets plugged going forward.
Hopefully, it hits effective zero, and people start buying EVs.
As a bonus, maybe the military will stop wasting gasoline to murder civilians, since we’ve already established they value oil over absolutely everything else, including human life.
Well... arguably it is partially our doing. Not for the reason's Tucker Carlson & Russia say, but that Obama and later Biden totally sat on their laurels after the Crimean invasion, totally paralyzed by fear of escalation and political fallout.
The counterpoint is that the US is producing more crude domestically than ever with more efficient drilling technology:
https://www.oilmonster.com/article/more-productive-wells-spu...
Insofar as I can tell what's really reflected here is a difference between Democrat and Republican policy positions. The Democrats want to minimize domestic environmental impact and be a net oil importer. Let someone else handle the dirty work of drilling. The Republicans are less concerned with the environmental impact and want to increase exports, oil jobs and economic sovereignty. With higher domestic production and less dependence on foreign states, such a large petroleum reserve is unnecessary.
I prefer the Republican position. It sucks to harm the environment. But it sucks more to enable some of the regimes we import oil from. They frequently are not close allies. We frequently end up immersing ourself in wars and other entanglements over this foreign oil. You want to stop the wars, you have to stop the dependence on imported oil. (To be clear I'm not arguing that Republicans will start less wars, or are a more moral party. I am arguing in favor of domestic oil production because it removes a justification for war.)
The Democratic position exports the moral hazard to a place where Americans don't see it. Takes it out of their backyard. But frankly that is an immoral approach which both parties have taken repeatedly and it has undermined the health of the nation. The other case where this takes place at an absolutely massive scale is exporting certain types of jobs to other countries where labor standards are lax, and where slave labor takes place. People out there killed themselves while making iPhone or your shoes because the working conditions in those countries were so horrible. I am willing to pay a little more for shoes and buy a little bit fewer luxury goods so that I don't enable slave labor. Move the jobs back onshore where we can regulate the well being of the workers. We can't control it if it's in another country.
Your position appears to be based on crude production and drawing an equivalency between Middle East crude and US crude. They are unfortunately not equivalent. I agree that it’s amazing that the US doesn’t wholly depend on the Mideast for oil, but until we can process our own crude as cheaply as Mideast crude can be processed, strife in the Middle East will still push energy prices up.
[delayed]
Whether or not I agree with your views, I thought your comment was thoughtfully constructed and am not sure why it's being downvoted.
[delayed]
This is not really supported by energy data. Under Biden/Harris, US crude production hit multiple consecutive all time highs and made the country a net exporter since 2020. In my world, that's the opposite of "minimizing domestic drilling." And producing oil doesn't prevent foreign wars; oil is a global commodity, energy markets are subject to global pricing events and disruptions anywhere drive up fuel prices in the US. Prices at the pump here don't care where crude was pumped. And the strange connection you draw between energy policy/oil reserves and offshore factory conditions conflates drastically different economic drivers. There is a real moral conversation to be had here about supply chain ethics but it doesn't get connected this way. This is a really shallow, cliche framing about drilling/importing rather than fossil fuel dominance and clean energy transition and drawing a preference to a party based on a bad view of it is really Peak Political Affiliation 2026.
looks like gasoline will skyrocket very soon very badly..
As has been predicted for months, I don’t recall where i read it but November has been in my brain for when this crisis is going to start.
So seriously, what is the administrations intention here? They’ve used all the missiles and drained all the gas. Are they trying to get the U.S. invaded?
Keep fuel prices low enough using the SPR to try to not lose at midterms. They don’t care what happens after, just as they don’t care about their constituents losing their Medicaid.
The cost of putting unsophisticated grifters in the ultimate position of power.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(Green New Deal via incompetence)
Shouldn't they at least care about the presidential election 2 years after that?
Why? He can’t run again or will die of natural causes, and the cult support goes with him when he goes.
https://x.com/LindseyGrahamSC/status/727604522156228608
I meant the Republican Party should care. I get why Trump doesn't.
most of them have been replaced, or are threatened to be replaced if they don't tow the party line.
It's not a traditional party in the American sense any more, there's no real policy making behind the scenes, it's basically the Trump family enriching itself and a rabid base enabling it. The institutional part that supposed to be the brain of the whole operation has left the building
The people in his admin certainly want to. It seems like Vance and Rubio are already subtley trying to position themselves for eventually running.
I don't share your optimism. I mean, yeah, he's doing to die soon, but his followers will just be suckered by the next con man who follows his playbook.
There have been a number of people who've tried to play some version of the Trump game. For whatever reason, he's the only one who ever got it to work. My theory is that it is because he has been a media presence, for better and worse, since the 1980s. Real estate, WWF, casinos, movies, reality TV, so much constant exposure. He's like the embodiment of 'no such thing as bad press'.
There have been Republican elected representatives who have confronted Trump. With very few exceptions, they have gone down to defeat in subsequent Republican primary elections.
The Republican electorate will not stand for Trump being constrained or criticized by Republicans. That's why there are almost no remaining Republican elected officials who are willing to confront the Trump administration aside from a handful of lame ducks like Tillis and Massie.
Functionally, the Republican congress is unable to hold the Trump administration to account, because Republican voters have ensured that it cannot. The only way Trump will ever be constrained is via Democrats.
Trump's influence has been fading and history shows he'll have practically none as a lame duck. The spell is breaking. As they say, at first gradually then all at once.
At this point I think they're planning on letting Democrats sweep the midterms, having things get even worse over the next 2 years, which is inevitable, and blaming the entire thing on Democratic obstruction. Their voters are dumb enough to believe it.
They aren't winning the midterms with this. Hopefully the grifter hopefuls will take the lesson to heart.
If you want to be unreasonably sympathetic to the trump admin, they could be assuming that iran et al are trying to hold out until the election on the belief that that might change something (see also the timing of houthi offensive and attacks on saudi arabia), and that if trump get over the hump of the election, iran no longer has a way to affect anything short term and will throw in the towel as they lack the ability to hold out long term.
Personally i think trump does not have a plan, but if you tried to sanewash it, i think that is the best rationale i've been able to find.
I think the general interpretation that both sides think something will change after the midterms is reasonable.
But
is something that I don't think even the most thoughtless parts of the administration really think right?
It's obvious that Iran is winning, not close to throwing in the towel. The US is reduced to trying to get the Straights of Hormuz open without paying a toll to Iran, which is a worse position than the US was in at the start of the war.
That is not at all obvious. Iran's Hormuz leverage has proven much less effective than they had originally hoped for and now they are feeling the economic cost of the decision. The SPR is drawing at a rate of 400K bbl/wk over the past few weeks. That's not great, but very far from catastrophic and is sustainable for years at current level of 285 mmbbl. It was recently Iran that tried to get the US back to the negotiating table, not the other way around.
Its not obvious.
To be clear, im not predicting an imminent collapse.
However, countries win wars by projecting strength. Sometimes that is true, and sometimes that is bluffing. It is extremely hard to tell which is which from the outside.
We do know that Iran was looking shakey prior to this war, and that this war has taken a significant toll, especially economically.
Will that translate to something? idk. In many ways you would think that if it was going to, it would already have happened.
However i think sometimes westerners have a very america centric perspective. The costs being suffered here are pretty low for america. Price at the pump is slightly higher. America used up some of its interceptors. That is a pretty low cost. Sure american allies are getting pounded, which has long term impacts, but that is not something ordinary americans will feel. On the other hand Iranians are feeling huge costs, and the longer it goes on, the worse their bargaining position gets (e.g. people frak more, pipelines get built etc).
All this to say, i dont know what is going to happen, but the Iranian position is fragile, and gets more fragile with time. Anything could happen.
I wouldn't necessarily say Iran is walking away unscathed. From what I've read on Reuters and other places, they're having serious economic problems due to this blockade. They've had to start reducing subsidies for gas, and they deliberately started with the heaviest users because they're worried that their citizens are going to reach a point where they're going to snap.
Again, we don't really know all the facts on the ground, and we don't know what the breaking point is, but this is partly the U.S.'s strategy here. Seems like it is producing results because Iran is open to more negotiation as these past few weeks have passed. Why would they do this if they were walking away unscathed and winning?
On the flip side, though, I do concede that the US people have just not borne the brunt of the disaster yet. When that happens, they snap like a twig, only because they didn't support this war to begin with. Support was at a record low when the war began and continued to drop to this day.
In the end Iran's goal seems more attainable: Make this so painful for the US that they do not dare try this again for a long time if ever.
The US's goal was topple the regime, install their puppet and acquire the nuclear material. Now its just getting back to the JCPOA or something like it. Not good enough for Iran. They want to make sure this stops for good.
SPR cannot meaningfully lower prices at the pump. It's simply not big enough. The only thing that does that is an end to the war.
Certainly, just like the Treasury is attempting to manipulate debt costs with their bond market interventions. Both are illusions of effort, both ineffective.
“Extend and pretend.” Luckily, we’re almost out of runway, both with oil and the bond market. Natural consequences are required to encourage improved outcomes.
(The war will not end until Iran decides to end it, just as Ukraine can lob drones at Russian refineries and oil terminals forever)
Iran and the Houthis both have to stop the war before all the Middle East supply chains start turning back on.
The US is winning on so many fronts these days, it’s getting hard to track. /s
Also price of oil isn't the only factor. Refineries going offline is a major factor in price at the pump, and there are a lot of refineries in the middle east. Its not just the price of unrefined oil.
Project 2025 fairly implicitly stated that the idea was to scuttle trust in the US government so badly that there would be a case for private equity to swoop in and save the day. That's what you're seeing.
[delayed]
Project 2025 can be anything you want it to be.
Most of the draw down was after Russia invaded Ukraine. This drawdown is a swap of 1 barrel now for 1.25 barrels later. So the intention is to keep prices down now and get more oil back later for "free".
It's actually shocking that so many comments don't know that the biggest draw -by far- happened under the Biden administration largely as a result of the Ukrainian War. In 2020 when the SPR wasn't full and oil was literally negative, Congress blocked the administration from buying oil to fill it. Instead they used the SPR for short term storage for oil companies (which was not the administration's original proposal.)
I get the Iran war part (though the bigger issue there is middle distillerates rather then crude atm), but people were screaming about the SPR drawdown, and lack of buying for 4 years before Trump ever got back into office; and it fell completely on deaf ears.
Why???
IIRC Congress was blocking anything Biden or the opposing party wanted to put in place that they had the power to block, and refusing any compromise.
They’ve ruined us.
He is indistinguishable from an attack by hostile foreign agents. A very successful attack.
Brought to you by the epestein war
And winter is coming
Crude oil demand peaks in summer, not winter
Thos year’s drop is terrible, but we know the reason. Anybody know why the big drop in 2021-22?
Trump got all the oil producers together in a room and put together a deal to restrict oil production during COVID.
This, naturally, resulted in higher oil prices, which the Republican party blamed Biden for.
They truly have no shame.
But why?
Simple, he made it up.
Same reason as today, trying to counter high energy prices.
It looks like there was a slow drop-off from about 2017 onward. The big drop started early 2022, likely related to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
The Biden administration (and other countries around the world in the International Energy Agency) released reserves to try to stabilize the spikes in prices due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
https://www.energy.gov/hgeo/opr/history-spr-releases (look at 2022 IEA Coordinate Release)
I am frankly a bit bewildered by all this. The US administration lies and lies. The Iranians lie. Doomers keep talking about how gas prices will skyrocket "in two weeks". Occasionally the "everything is fine, nothing to see here" folks wheel out some journalist saying there will be a peace deal any day now.
It's pretty difficult to figure out what the reality is besides "not good".
Diesel touched $8.99/gal this week. I want to know what happens when the sign runs out of digits at $10.
Is it tied to the cash register? Will the pumps run out of digits too? Will they still be able to sell gas?
One thing I can say: My F150 won’t care. It runs off solar.
If you liked Y2K, you're gonna love 2.2f!
You mean 2.3. Gas prices all go down to tenths of a penny.
If anyone knew for sure they would make a killing at the stock market.
However we dont know what the future holds. All sorts of factors affect what is going to happen. Will china continue to import less? Will the houthis be able to stop Saudi exports long term or is it just a short term issue? Will USA be able to guard ships passing through the strait? Will Iran face some sort of internal collapse? Will USA pack up and go home? Will other countries be drawn into this war?
Nobody can tell you what is really "going on" because nobody knows what the future holds and uncertainty is high.
The headline is hiding the fact that this was a fairly modest 400K bbl draw for the week.
The reserve is effectively empty at 250M-300M barrels, and currently sits at 284M. The rapid deceleration to 400K could mean that there’s no quick way to keep withdrawing the remaining reserves.
Global oil prices haven't skyrocketed so far thanks to China inverting the OPEC strategy of keeping prices up by destroying supply.
China stopped/reduced buying, used their large reserves, EVs and now accelerating EV trucks. And also coal to liquids.
Eventually, China may have to start buying and thats when the fun begins.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/17/business/energy-environme...
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Coal/Chinas-Renewable-Boom-Masks...
China is now the world’s great oil power. Forget OPEC. The Chinese Communist Party calls the shots. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49238158
We can simply get rid of most oil - Just ONE square mile of batteries and a TOTAL of 100 x 100 square miles of Solar can power the entire USA 24/7.
It is because of world wide adoption of EVs that the fossil fuel demand has reduced and stabilized gas prices in the US.
See : https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/batteries-have-unlo...
how about the oil from Venezuela?
Will take years to make productive if anyone is even willing to invest in it.
It will need 10s - 100s of billions of investment. By the time they start producing, demand would have been permanently destroyed, thanks to China supplying the world with EVs and solar panels. With sufficient demand destruction, oil should be priced like salt, a simple commodity that nobody ever cares about the price.
Oil companies are not super keen on investing and increasing supply, it will destroy profits.
Turning Oil Into Salt: Energy Independence Through Fuel Choice: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/6963043-turning-oil-i...