US government halts oil reserve release
(VOVWORLD) -US President Joe Biden's administration has halted the withdrawal of crude oil from the strategic oil reserve as the government tries to restock the reserve after releasing more than 200M barrels in the past 14 months to keep fuel prices low for Americans.
 Oil reserve in Cushing, Oklahoma, USA. Photo: AFP/VNA
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The Energy Information Administration said in its weekly inventory report Thursday, SPR crude balance of 371.6M barrels at the end of the Jan. 13 week, unchanged from the previous week to Jan. 6. The zero SPR draw for last week closes the chapter on some 220M barrels taken from the emergency oil reserve since November 2021 by the Biden administration to provide more crude to the marketplace and bring pump prices of gasoline down.
Prior to those draws, SPR inventories stood at just under 600M barrels. At their present level of just above 370M, the reserve’s stockpiles are at their lowest since December 1983, the EIA said.
At one time, the administration drew as much as 8M barrels weekly from the reserve. The crude releases from the SPR, along with other global market developments, added significantly to international oil supplies over the past year. They helped slash crude prices from a high of more than 130 USD a barrel in early March, right after the outbreak of fighting in Ukraine and the subsequent sanctions on Russian crude, to below 90 USD a barrel by August.