The Ministry of Energy said that it purchased 2.4 million barrels of… Oil In reserve for delivery from April to May to the strategic reserve site in Bryan Mound, Texas.
She added that the purchases exhausted the ministry’s fund. The proceeds from the sale of 180 million barrels of crude oil in 2022 amounted to approximately $17 billion in emergency buyback revenue, but Congress eliminated about $2.05 billion to help offset the deficit at the national level.
The Biden administration repurchased 59 million barrels after the 2022 sale at an average price of less than $76 per barrel, much lower than the $95 per barrel at which it sold in 2022. That resulted in a profit of about $3.5 billion, the Energy Department said. .
US Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said that this effort reinforces “the administration’s commitment to putting the economic and energy security of the American people first through measures that have stabilized prices for the consumer, provided certainty for the industry, and preserved the strategic reserve as the largest source of emergency crude oil supply in the world.” .
The sale of 180 million barrels in 2022 over six months was the largest ever from the strategic reserve. It helped counter the rise in gasoline prices in the United States to record levels of more than five dollars a gallon in June 2022.
It also led to strategic reserve levels falling to a 40-year low of less than 350 million barrels, drawing criticism from some lawmakers who said it breached the US energy security barrier.
The strategic reserve currently contains approximately 390 million barrels. It reached its largest ever level of nearly 727 million barrels in 2009.
The United States is now the world’s largest oil and gas producer, thanks to techniques such as hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. It enjoys higher levels of energy security than in the mid-1970s when Washington created the Strategic Reserve, the world’s largest emergency oil reserve, after supply shocks such as the Arab oil embargo.
