Read it for yourself.

To me this shows massive withdrawals in 2021-2022 and again in the last two years.

Never mind this

> On March 19, 2020, President Donald Trump directed the Department of Energy to fill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to maximum capacity, when oil was priced at $24 per barrel. This directive was given to help support domestic oil producers given the impending economic collapse from COVID-19 and extreme drops in international oil markets. However, funding was blocked by Congress, with Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer stating that Democrats had blocked a "bailout for big oil".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Petroleum_Reserve_(U...

These sentences are deceptive and journalistic malpractice. The "instead" implies there have been dozens of *full* drawdowns. Check the data: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f4/US...

“Dozens of cycles” is totally misleading. They do not mean FULL cycles. The only truthful reading of this claim is that there have been dozens of years that some oil has been released.

The only major drawdowns occur 2020-present.

What would the US government have realistically been able to know or expect in 1974 with only one major oil shock big enough to warrant the creation of the system?

Knowable but not admittable, maybe

The US has local oil extraction so in theory its oil supply should be easily self-sustaining. Of course oil doesn't work like that (the local refinement industry is not built for the domestic oil) but this failure is ultimately a consequence of economic policy - not that the US is unique in this.

As I understand it, the oil reserves simply weren't built for frequent use. They were built as a backup plan for a global supply chain collapse. Arguably that happened twice in recent history - first with COVID, then with the US deciding to do it itself by getting into a war with the one state where its experts had predicted a war would cause this to happen and that could not readily be defeated because it's literally carved into a vast mountain range and had decades to come up with a plan for defending itself.

Honestly, the war on Iran isn't even in the range of ordinary American politics - even if you come from the most pessimistic "CIA regime change world tour" angle. There's no coherent reason for it to have been executed the way it was that doesn't require assumptions that most people justifiably would dismiss as conspiracy theories (e.g. intentional destroying the global economy for short-term profit through betting & investments).

It's noteworthy that the caverns holding the reserves are on the verge of collapsing. But it's kind of a moot point because there's no way to restore global supply lines in time to refill them when fully drained this time. Tankers are the only viable way to transport large amounts of oil over long distances and it would take months for any shipments out of the region to arrive and there have been practically no shipments for months already.

Unless the US is going to enact rationing, reserves will be gone soon and so will be local supply. Plus if there's any place willing and able to buy oil at a ridiculous markup, that's where the market (and the remaining supply) will go unless the US wants to pivot into outright piracy.

for some reason, US government really love to pounce on middle east

> What was the use case covered by this huge reserve if only a small part can be used before geopardising its future?

Total global war (WWII style), total economic collapse (1929 style), and other kinds of not-even-once-in-a-generation multi-year catastrophes.

Voters getting angry about the price of gas is not one of them.

Boomer politics has always been about me and not thee.

The amount the US produces is a larger number than the amount that the US consumes.

But what the US produces is not necessarily what the US consumes.

Oil markets are global and there is tons of trading going on, so it's not really at all a "fully in house" operation.

Because what the US produces is just a kind of oil. Not all oil is the same, IIRC the US produces mostly light crude.

Releasing barrels lowers the price but it's obviously only a temporary measure.

I think it's a story as the cease fire with Iran is about to run out

Oil self-sufficiency isn't quite as simple as oil production > oil exports because not all crude is the same and refineries generally aren't completely crude-type-agnostic. IIRC US refineries prefer processing "heavy" (higher proportion of longer hydrocarbons) and "sour" (higher sulfur proportion) crude but most US production is "light" (higher proportion of shorter hydrocarbons) and "sweet" (lower sulfur proportion), so as a result the US still ends up importing/exporting a bunch of crude.

USA exports a lot of oil, but that cannot be used by the US oil refineries, which need to import oil, or take it from reserves.

Therefore USA is not oil independent, despite being a net exporter.