The United States has drawn 66 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as part of an authorized release of 172 million barrels. At the current rate, we’ll hit that sometime in early September, at which point the SPR will bring inventories to 243 million barrels, a historic low, down from a peak of 700 million barrels in 2009. Any deal to reopen traffic through the Strait of Hormuz would still need months to reverberate through the global energy economy, so that’s a substantial drawdown in reserves. Commercial stocks of oil are also being pushed to their limit; tanks need to have 10 percent to 15 percent capacity in storage to keep operations normal, and one storage hub in Cushing, Oklahoma has drawn inventories down to 21 million barrels, a hair above its 20 million barrel limit.
Collin Eaton, Benoit Morenne, and Michael R. Gordon, The Wall Street Journal
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