Strategic Petroleum Reserve Case Study

The United States can turn to the emergency stockpiles of petroleum products managed by the Department of Energy 's Office of Petroleum Reserves (OPR). The mission of the OPR is to protect the United States from severe petroleum supply disruptions through the purchase, storage, distribution and management of emergency petroleum stocks and to carry out U.S. obligations under the International Energy Program. The OPR manages three stockpiles: the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the Northeast Home Heating Oil Reserve, and the Gasoline Supply Reserve. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is designed to hold 713.5 million barrels of oil which is the largest government-owned stockpile of emergency crude oil in the world. The SPR provides the President with a powerful response option should a disruption in commercial oil supplies threaten the U.S. economy. In 1956 President Eisenhower suggested the creation of the strategic petroleum reserve, however …show more content…
As of December 2, 2016 the current stock inventory of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is 429 million bbls. The last sale was considered a “test sale” in March of 2014. In September 1990 and November 1985 these were also considered “test sales” which totaled 10 million bbls of oil. The largest oil sale in the last 20 years came in June of 2011, the IEA coordinated release sold 30.64 million bbls of oil. This sale was in response to the ongoing loss of crude oil due to supply disruptions in Libya and other countries and their impact on the global economic recovery. I will provide charts of past sales and releases at the end of my paper so others can look further into the history of the sales from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The SPR locations stores both sweet crude and sour crude. The U.S. economy rough consumes 18-19 million barrels of oil on a daily basis. In 2013, the nation 's demand for gasoline rose for the first time since