Curious, does anyone know if the US govt is filling the reserve now, or even adding capacity? With oil so incredibly cheap right now, now is the absolute best time to be building and expanding our reserves.
This would be the time to buying. I remember when it was 100+ dollars people were saying it will never go less than 100. Then when it was at 40 it will never go to a 100. Then it went to 100 in 2014. It's like people just don't look at history.
To provide some context, the US uses about 20m barrels of oil per day. We have about 35 days worth of oil reserves. It seems if there was some kind of extended emergency where we could not produce oil, 772m barrels would be wholly inadequate.
I hate headlines like this. The oil isn't "hidden": the strategic petroleum reserve is a completely up front and public thing. There's no hiding going on. That word in the headline is just clickbait.
If some great catastrophe someday flattens our civilization, these reserves (and others of the sort, globally) will probably be the only oil sources accessible to civilization as it tries to rebuild. They may even be enough - we use oil at an absurd rate now, but for most of our technological development (excepting perhaps the world wars) I'd imagine it was much less.
I am sure an alien race visiting the earth in 2020 would be astonished to see how frenzied human beings are in digging up meteors (the ONLY source of gold outside the Earth's core) but worst of all, why are these humans digging up liquids in Saudi Arabia and transporting them halfway around the world only to bury them in Louisiana?
In a way, oil reserves (even more so with precious metal reserves, for that matter) amount to prepping at the state level, don't they?<p>I get why in an economy that to a large extent depends on petrol having such a reserve might alleviate some fear.<p>However, I also don't want to imagine a situation where the US actually would have to use this reserve.
Two naive questions:<p>Does the salt of the actual cavern dissolve in the oil? And does that effect the quality?<p>Are these reserves easy military targets? It would seem causing an explosion in one of these would be catastrophic. I can see why this wouldn't be, but I'd like to leave this question as is to promote (fun) discussion.
The 2018 Trump tax reform authorized selling 30% of the reserve in order to shrink the federal deficit. They only sold off 10% before halting, due to a glut depressing US energy industry.<p><a href="https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_sum_sndw_dcus_nus_w.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_sum_sndw_dcus_nus_w.htm</a><p>Line 7 under Stocks list the weekly SPR. Clicks its box, the graph button at top to get a history graph.
Moderators, the title here is inappropriate and arguably linkbait. The article itself does not claim that the US strategic petroleum reserve is "hidden". The article's title, "What is the Strategic Petroleum Reserve?" would be better.
I wouldn't call it "hidden", it's public knowledge. It needs to be filled however because oil is so cheap.<p>And for the keyboard nay-sayers that are typing on a keyboard made of ABS, walking their down on a nylon leash, holding their iPhone in a TPU case, drinking from a polycarbonate reusable water bottle, wondering how we're going to refine steel for wind turbines, oil is an incredible useful substance.<p>Let's learn from the N95 mask shortage. It's incredibly important to have national stockpiles to decouple ourselves from the events in the world (like the one happening now).