The SPR is draining, and it did not stop at the ceasefire

The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve is the country's emergency oil stockpile, crude held in deep salt caverns along the Gulf Coast that the government can release when supply gets disrupted. In our weekly inventory series it fell to 340.3 million barrels for the week ending June 12, 2026, down 8.9 million barrels from the week before. That is the lowest reading in our records since July 1983. Our weekly SPR series runs back to August 1982, and the last time it sat at or below this level was the week of July 29, 1983.

The pace is the story. In late March the reserve held about 415 million barrels. By mid-June it was at 340 million. That is roughly 75 million barrels gone in about eleven weeks, a recent run rate near 8 to 9 million barrels a week, which works out to about 1.2 million barrels a day. The draw did not pause for the ceasefire. It ran straight through it.

For scale, the SPR peaked at an all-time high of 726.6 million barrels in late December 2009 (Department of Energy). Today's 340 million is under half of that. The reserve has held more than twice today's level inside the careers of people still working the rigs.

There is a second tank worth watching alongside the reserve. Cushing, Oklahoma, is the delivery point that sets the U.S. oil benchmark price, so its stock level is a close-up read on how tight the market feels. In our data Cushing held 20.0 million barrels for the week ending June 12, down 1.6 million on the week. So the emergency stockpile and the pricing hub are drawing down at the same time.

Here is the honest part on cost, because it is easy to get wrong. The SPR's average acquisition price across its whole history is $29.70 a barrel (Department of Energy). In 2022 the government sold 180 million barrels in an emergency release at an average of about $95 a barrel, then bought oil back to refill: the Department of Energy's direct purchases averaged under $76 a barrel, and barrels secured by canceling mandated sales came in near $74 (Department of Energy). In other words, the most recent refills came in cheaper than the 2022 sale. So the popular line that "refilling will just cost more than we got" is not supported by the record. What a future refill costs depends on where oil trades when it happens, and that is genuinely unknown. We are not going to pretend to know it.

The caverns themselves are the other quiet variable. The reserve is stored in salt domes, and salt slowly creeps inward, which stresses the wells and caverns and has to be remediated to keep them sound (Sandia National Laboratories). The Department of Energy has run a multibillion-dollar "Life Extension" modernization program for exactly this reason, and each drawdown cycle of pressurizing and depressurizing adds wear (Department of Energy). The plain version: low levels and heavy use strain the storage, and the upkeep is a real, funded line item. That is a maintenance fact, not a collapse forecast.

So set the pieces side by side. Our weekly series shows the reserve at its lowest since 1983, drawing about 8 to 9 million barrels a week, and it did not flinch at the ceasefire. The peak-to-now comparison and the cost-of-refill numbers are Department of Energy figures. Put together, the war explains why the draw started. It does not explain why the draw kept going.

Our bias, for the record: an emergency reserve that keeps emptying after the emergency is supposed to be over is the part worth watching, more than the headline that started it. We will keep counting the barrels every week. Someone has to, and it may as well be the people who already enjoy a good spreadsheet.