President Donald Trump campaigned on refilling the United States’s emergency reserves of crude oil as soon as he returned to office, but roughly a year and a half into his second administration, the stockpiles are inching closer to multidecade lows.Industry experts have sounded the alarm over the record-low levels, saying lower stocks could lead to higher prices at the pump or leave the U.S. with fewer supplies to respond to future geopolitical and energy crises. Some analysts are now blaming complacency from Congress and current and past administrations over a failure to refill the oil inventories ahead of what has been called the largest energy crisis in history.The Strategic Petroleum Reserve was first created in 1975 in the wake of the Arab oil embargo, with the intention to protect the markets and U.S. consumers from severe supply shocks and price spikes.
It is one of the largest emergency crude stockpiles in the world, with a total capacity of around 714 million barrels across four main facilities.
As of the start of June, however, there were just 349.2 million barrels of crude recorded in the SPR, nearly the lowest the reserves have been in 40 years.
The risk of falling too low
