Strategic Petroleum Reserve is a system of United States government storage facilities that hold supplies of crude oil. The government created the reserve to protect the nation from disruptions in the flow of petroleum supplies. The reserve is maintained by the U.S. Department of Energy. It has the capacity to store more than 700 million barrels of oil in underground salt caverns along the Gulf Coast.
The U.S. Congress created the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in 1975 as a response to nationwide fuel shortages. In 1973 and 1974, oil-producing nations in the Middle East had halted their exports of oil to the United States to punish it for supporting Israel in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. In 1977, the U.S. government acquired existing salt caverns to store the reserve’s first stockpile of oil. The Department of Energy then began to create additional caverns within salt deposits along the Gulf Coast. Today, four storage facilities—two in Louisiana and two in Texas—contain a total of 60 caverns. A typical cavern measures about 2,000 feet (610 meters) from top to bottom and lies at a depth of about 2,000 to 4,000 feet (610 to 1,220 meters) below ground.
The president of the United States has the authority to order the sale and transfer of oil from the reserve to commercial distributors should the nation face an oil supply disruption that threatens its economy. Such transfers occurred in 1991, at the start of the Persian Gulf War; in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina hit the U.S. Gulf Coast; and in 2022, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The Department of Energy also oversees two reserves separate from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The Northeast Home Heating Oil Reserve was created in 2000 to protect households in the northeastern United States from disruptions in heating oil supplies. Most of the nation’s homes heated by oil lie in the Northeast. The reserve holds 1 million barrels of heating oil in storage tanks in Connecticut and Massachusetts.
The Naval Petroleum and Oil Shale Reserves (NPOSR) were created in the early 1900’s by setting aside known oil-bearing lands to ensure supplies of fuel for the U.S. military. Military needs for the NPOSR never arose, and in 1976, Congress authorized commercial development of the reserves. The reserves produced large amounts of crude oil and natural gas before the Department of Energy began to transfer its NPOSR properties to other federal agencies or to sell them in the late 1990’s. The NPOSR retains one small oil field and an oil field technology testing center in Wyoming.
