DOE Says Half of Planned 172-Million-Bbl SPR Release Will be Loaned to Buyers
Half of the planned 172-million-bbl release of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve will be loaned to buyers, who will be required to return eventually to the stockpile, the Trump administration said.
The White House last week announced the SPR withdrawal in response to sharply higher crude prices following the late-February attack on Iran by U.S. and Israel.
In late Friday request for proposals, the Department of Energy said the exchange provision will allow barrels to enter the market without permanently depleting holdings.
The agency said the exchange is the first planned release of oil, but didn’t say how many other exchanges it has planned.
“Under the terms of the exchange, companies will return the borrowed oil to DOE with additional barrels as a premium, strengthening the Strategic Petroleum Reserve while stabilizing markets at no cost to American taxpayers,” DOE said.
If RFPs are accepted, then the first deliveries are expected to begin moving to market by the end of next week, DOE added. The oil will come from SPR sites in Bryan Mound and Bayou Choctaw, Texas, and West Hackberry, La.
The agency said it expects the release of the full 172 million bbl will take about 120 days to deliver based on planned discharge rates.
Exchange barrels will be returned to DOE “on a schedule designed to protect commercial markets and the American people, while ensuring the reserve remains a critical national security asset,” the agency added.
The SPR release is part of a coordinated effort by member countries of the International Energy Agency to release a total of 400 million bbl of crude from strategic reserves in an effort to address rising energy prices amid the war in Iran.
It’s unclear how much of an impact the planned release will have on prices paid by U.S. motorists.
In an analysis posted on Substack last week, petroleum economist Philip Verleger said a review of historical data showed there is no correlation between stock releases and changes in U.S. gasoline prices.
“I note that there were no discernible gasoline price impacts when massive strategic reserve releases were made in 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine,” Verleger said in his post. “This finding suggests that the IEA’s March 11 announcement of a strategic stock release will do nothing to lower U.S. gasoline prices at the pump.”
As of Friday, there were 415.4 million bbl of oil in the U.S. strategic reserve, including 154.9 million bbl of sweet crude and 260.5 million bbl of sour crude. The planned U.S. release represents about 41% of SPR holdings.
Based on current stocks, at the end of the release there could be 243.3 million bbl left in the reserve, the lowest level in Energy Information Administration record-keeping dating to back to 1982.
It’s also well below the recent low of 346.758 million bbl in July 2023. SPR holdings fell to that level after the Biden administration conducted a series of releases starting in July 2020, initially in a bid to reduce fuel prices as the economic emerged from pandemic-related shutdowns and later in response to Western sanctions on Russian oil purchases.
None of those releases, however, involved exchanges.
Instead, both the Biden and Trump administrations have been buying crude to raise SPR stocks. DOE data showed 38.8 million bbl was added in 2024 and 19.7 million bbl in 2025. Only 1.9 million bbl have been added to the SPR so far this year, agency records showed.
Reporting by Steven Cronin, scronin@opisnet.com; Editing by Jeffrey Barber, jbarber@opisnet.com