WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 04th May, 2022) The stockpile of the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), which stores the nation's emergency oil supplies, is down to its lowest level in 20 years as the Biden administration continuously makes withdrawals to feed a supply-starved market, Energy Information Administration (EIA) data revealed on Wednesday.
SPR inventories stood at 550 million barrels as of the week that ended on April 29, after a withdrawal of 3.1 million barrels during the week, the EIA's Weekly Petroleum Status Report showed.� Historical EIA data also showed the stockpile level to be at its lowest since December 2001.
The Biden administration has taken 3 million barrels on average out of the SPR every week over the past two months to help meet domestic refiners' demand for crude in a market seeing a surfeit in fuel consumption amid the economic recovery from the two-year long coronavirus pandemic. Western sanctions on Russia, which have impeded supply from one of the world's largest oil producers, have added to the supply tightness in oil.
"The SPR stock situation is likely to continue dropping in the foreseeable future unless the global supply situation for oil gets better," John Kilduff, a partner at New York energy hedge fund Again Capital, said.
President Joe Biden authorized his first major SPR withdrawal in November as oil supplies began tightening amid rapid recovery in demand and the global growth that pushed up both crude and fuel prices. The Biden administration's biggest SPR releases will commence from this month when it issues a total of 180 million barrels from the reserve. Another 60 million barrels are due to be released into the world market in May by US allies and member countries in the International Energy Agency.
Tight oil supplies pushed the global price of crude to 14-year highs of almost $140 per barrel in March and the pump price of US gasoline to a record high of above $4.30 a gallon. In�Wednesday's trade, the London-traded Brent crude, which serves as the global benchmark for oil, hovered at $108 a barrel while gasoline retailed at $4.23 per gallon on average at the pump across the United States.
