The Reserve Drawdown

By Mercer Hale. From MFGCalcs Magazine, Issue 1, November 2026, page 47.

On March 6, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the government’s emergency crude, held 415.4 million barrels in salt caverns on the Gulf Coast of Texas and Louisiana. By Oct. 16 it held 282.7 million, the least in the Energy Information Administration’s weekly records since 1982, when the reserve was still filling.

It was built to empty in a hurry, about six times faster than it can be filled, the Government Accountability Office reported in May. A salt cavern can also be drained only so many times. The same GAO report found: “Most notably, at Bayou Choctaw, three of the six caverns have only one expected remaining drawdown available and two may have developed a pathway between them that could limit their safe use. DOE told us it is currently working on potential chemical and engineering solutions to move oil in and out of these caverns safely.”

The oil left fast. More than nine-tenths of what has been drawn since March was gone by Aug. 14, and over the last five weeks the drain has nearly stopped.

The release was set up as a loan, not a sale, according to an Atlantic Council issue brief: first-round borrowers agreed to return 18% to 22% more oil than they took. In a March Energy Department statement, Secretary Chris Wright set the clock: the United States, he said, had arranged to more than replace the barrels within the next year.

Even at the reserve’s maximum fill rate, the brief estimates, returning the barrels already exchanged would take at least 198 days. The brief’s authors, Jamie Webster and Morgan D. Bazilian, wrote in October for the Atlantic Council: “Refilling occurs at a much slower rate than withdrawals, meaning the SPR will potentially be in fill mode for more than a year.”

Since March 6, the reserve has not ended a single week fuller than it began.

Read it in the magazine

• MFGCalcs Magazine, Issue 1, November 2026, page 47