Christmas (de-)Stocking

22-Dec-2016: In recent years, global oil markets have focused on the growth of the Strategic Petroleum Reserves (SPR) in China and – more recently – India as important drivers for crude oil imports and tanker demand. Relatively little attention has been given to the world’s largest inventory of emergency crude oil, the U.S. SPR, stored in huge underground salt caverns along the coastline of the Gulf of Mexico. The U.S. SPR has a design capacity of 713.5 million barrels. The current inventory stands at approximately 695 million barrels, 266 million barrels of which is sweet crude, while the other 429 million barrels are sour crude. So far this year, there has been no movement in the SPR inventory, but this is likely to change in 2017. The Department of Energy recently announced that it will sell crude oil from the SPR as early as in January next year. The U.S. Congress has approved a number of sales and if all planned sales go ahead, the U.S. SPR could be reduced by some 190 million barrels between 2017 and 2025. Please fill out the form to read full article.