WASHINGTON: Delayed maintenance has dogged the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve with capacity issues that limit officials’ ability to quickly draw down the emergency stockpile, the Energy Department’s inspector general said yesterday.
The SPR is unable to achieve its required 90-day drawdown rate of 4.415 million barrels per day, and fell about 165,000 bpd short of that mark in March, the inspector general said in a report.
Natural forces known as “creep” on the reserves held in underground salt caverns in Louisiana and Texas can reduce the capacity of the reserve if regular maintenance is not conducted.
Designed to store 727 million barrels of oil in 62 caverns, the SPR currently holds about 691 million barrels. “Our analysis indicates that the Reserve would be unable to replace the more than 35 million barrels of oil sold since 2011, without compromising capacity maintenance activities,” it said. The SPR was last tapped in March when the Energy Department held a test sale of 5 million barrels, the first such test sale since 1990. Reuters
