Depleted strategic oil reserve nears level that raises concerns about damage to caverns, operations — SkimNews
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- Strategic Petroleum Reserve has fallen below 300 million barrels for the first time since the reserve was filled in the early 1980s, with 172 million barrels being released in response to the Iran war, leaving inventories at roughly 243 million barrels after the drawdown completes.
- Amos Hochstein, a senior energy advisor under President Joe Biden, disputed the Energy Department's 70-million-barrel safety floor this week, warning that dropping to that level would deplete the reserve "to the point of never resurrecting it" and physically damage the salt caverns.
- Siddharth Misra, a petroleum engineering professor at Texas A&M, set the practical operational floor at 250 to 300 million barrels, saying below 300 million the SPR loses rapid emergency pumping capacity and risks pipe and pump damage from thinning oil layers.
- The Government Accountability Office reported in May that repeated partial drawdowns can leach single sections of caverns into "undesirable shapes" and found more than a quarter of SPR inventory was unavailable for drawdown as of December 2025 due to construction and cavern outages.
- U.S. Energy Department spokesman Ben Dietderich rejected the collapse warnings, stating "the caverns are always full" with only the oil-water ratio changing, and calling the SPR a "critical national security asset" being "responsibly managed."
- Rapidan Energy analysts estimated a "soft-ish floor" of about 170 million barrels, below which cavern integrity and pumping limitations argue against further draws.
- The SPR was originally designed for just five full drawdowns but has executed dozens over 40 years, causing "severe cavern deformation" and accelerating salt falls from the ceilings, according to Misra.
Why it matters: With the SPR now near 243 million barrels after the Iran war release, the U.S. sits below the operational floor where engineers say emergency pumping slows and cavern damage compounds — and a single Gulf Coast hurricane could leave the country short on rapid-response crude, a gap that takes years to refill at scale.
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