Strategic Petroleum Reserve Levels in 2026

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve held 282.7 million barrels of crude oil in the week ending October 16, 2026, according to the EIA. That is 40 percent of the 714 million barrels the Department of Energy lists as its authorized capacity, 132.4 million barrels less than on March 27, and the lowest weekly reading since October 15, 1982. The oil left through exchanges, which are loans repaid in barrels, not through sales.

The fall of 132 million barrels in 29 weeks includes the largest weekly drop in the EIA series, 9.92 million barrels in the week ending May 15, a daily rate of about a third of the reserve’s nominal maximum. Cover is a matter of the denominator: the same stock is 46 days of gross crude imports, 128 days of net imports and 17 days of refinery input. The weekly figure is one row of the Wednesday report described in the weekly petroleum status report guide.

Two official counts of the same oil

Two agencies publish the level and they do not match to the decimal. The EIA reports ending stocks of crude oil in the SPR every week (series WCSSTUS1, in thousand barrels): 282,683 thousand for the week ending October 16. DOE’s Office of Petroleum Reserves posts its own inventory by site as of the same date, and the total is 282.2 million barrels. A gap of about half a million barrels is the sort of difference timing and rounding produce, and for anything above the scale of a single cavern it does not matter.

Bryan Mound alone holds about half the oil, and sour crude is two-thirds of the total, so a release of sweet crude draws on a much smaller pool (96.6 million barrels) than the headline number suggests. The 40-million-barrel exchange solicited on September 29 draws on the Big Hill and Bryan Mound sites, which together hold 227 million barrels.

Why a release does not reach every refinery

The reserve is four sites on the Gulf Coast joined to the rest of the country by three distribution systems, and DOE describes which refineries each one reaches. The Seaway system includes Bryan Mound and connects to refinery hubs in Houston, Texas City and Freeport. The Texoma system includes Big Hill and West Hackberry, with connections to the Beaumont-Port Arthur, Lake Charles and New Orleans area refineries and limited connectivity to Houston. The Capline system includes Bayou Choctaw and connects to the Baton Rouge refineries and one New Orleans area refinery. As of March 2025, DOE counted 24 Gulf Coast area refineries and six in Michigan, Ohio and Kentucky as connected by SPR-owned and commercial pipelines and terminals, plus three contracted marine terminals with a combined distribution capacity of 2.22 million barrels per day and one DOE-owned terminal at St. James, Louisiana, with 400 thousand.

That map explains two of the choices in Table 3 below. Releases are posted by site, such as the 30 million barrels of sweet crude from West Hackberry on April 9, because a barrel in one cavern cannot be sent to a refinery on another system. And the pipeline and terminal capacity, not the 4.4 million barrels per day of nominal drawdown capability, sets what can reach a given refiner on a given week. The observed peak of 1.42 million barrels a day in the weekly data is a third of the nominal figure, and DOE does not say which of the two limits, contracts or logistics, set it.

From 727 million barrels to 283: the long view

The reserve was built up from its first delivery of 412,000 barrels in 1977 to a peak of 726.6 million in December 2009, and has spent most of the time since shrinking. Table 2 gives year-end levels at ten-year-ish intervals plus the turning points, and expresses each as a share of today’s 714 million barrel capacity so the readings can be compared.

The long record falls into phases. From 1985 to 2010 the reserve grew from 493 to 727 million barrels. From 2010 to 2021 it drifted down to 594 million. In 2022 it fell by about 222 million barrels in a single year, to 372 million at year-end, in the release DOE describes as the 2022 IEA coordinated action of 180 million barrels, which was structured as sales. It bottomed at 346.8 million barrels in July 2023, rebuilt to 413 million by the end of 2025, and then fell by 132 million barrels between March 27 and October 16, 2026.

The DOE reports that it has used the reserve for an emergency drawdown on four occasions in its history, along with test sales and a series of exchanges to individual refiners after hurricanes and pipeline outages. The size of the 2026 action, a 172-million-barrel commitment, is in the same range as the 180 million barrels of the 2022 sale and much larger than any exchange before it (the largest in DOE’s history page is the 29.5 million barrels exchanged in 2021).

Why the level fell: a series of loans

DOE’s own press releases give the sequence. In the week of March 9 the United States committed 172 million barrels as its share of a 400-million-barrel release coordinated by the International Energy Agency’s member countries. DOE’s March 13 announcement describes the context as global oil supply routes facing disruption from escalating tensions in the Middle East and attacks carried out by Iran and its proxies. The mechanism chosen was an exchange, under which participating companies return the borrowed oil to DOE with additional barrels as a premium.

Read the right-hand column as DOE’s accounting, not an audit. By DOE’s count more than 133 million barrels had been awarded across four completed exchanges when it issued the September 29 solicitation, and the premium it quoted moved from 24 percent in April to 26 percent in June and 25 percent in September. Those percentages are the extra barrels returned on top of the barrels borrowed. At 24 to 26 percent, 133 million barrels borrowed would come back as 165 to 168 million, an addition of 32 to 35 million barrels to the reserve once the contracts are fully repaid. DOE’s April announcements say the barrels come back by the following year, and the October 10 hurricane exchange is to be repaid in 2027. The return schedules are in the contracts and are not public in the sources read for this page, so this page does not project when the level recovers.

Past releases on one scale

Raw barrel counts hide how different the episodes were. A 17-million-barrel sale in 1991 was 3 percent of a reserve of 586 million; the 2022 sale of 180 million was 31 percent of the 577 million in the reserve at the start of March. Table 4 divides each release volume in DOE’s history page by the EIA weekly level just before it began.

On this measure the 2026 awards, about 32 percent of the March 27 level, are close to the 2022 sale at 31 percent, and the full 172-million-barrel commitment would be 41 percent. The difference that matters is the structure. The 2022 barrels were sold and the reserve was refilled later by separate purchases; the 2026 barrels are owed back, with a premium. A reader comparing the two should keep that in mind before reading the level at the end of each as the same kind of depletion.

Month by month, and the fastest weeks on record

The decline was concentrated in four months. From March 27 to June 26 the reserve lost 89 million barrels, an average of about 0.98 million barrels a day. The single largest weekly drop in the EIA series, which starts in August 1982, was 9.92 million barrels in the week ending May 15, 2026, followed by 9.06 million barrels in the weeks ending May 22 and June 19. The 2022 sale’s largest week was 8.41 million barrels, on September 9. Even the 2026 maximum is a daily rate of 1.42 million barrels, or 32 percent of the 4.4 million barrels per day DOE lists as the maximum nominal capability. The pace slowed to under 1 million barrels a week from the week ending September 11, and the reading on October 9 was unchanged from October 2.

Where the extra barrels went

A release matters only if the barrels reach someone. The same weekly report that carries the SPR figure carries U.S. production, imports, refinery input and exports, so the 29 weeks since April 3 can be compared with the same weeks of 2025. Table 6 lines up the differences, in thousand barrels per day, as a rough balance. It is a comparison of two periods, not a causal account.

The SPR supplied the biggest single difference, about 712 thousand barrels a day, more than field production added (330) and more than imports gave up (111). On the use side, exports rose by 543 thousand barrels a day, the largest move on that side, and refinery input rose by 299. The commercial crude stock fell by 49.1 million barrels across the 29 weeks against 17.0 million in 2025. Put differently, SPR oil went into a market that was exporting more and refining more, and about 23 percent of the added supply sits in the unexplained remainder. The explanation for exports is in the US crude oil exports guide and the supply side in the production by state guide.

What the headline stock figure hides

The Wednesday report is read for its crude stock number, and the commercial number and the total number can point in different directions while the SPR is moving. In the 29 weeks from April 3 to October 16, 2026 the SPR fell 132.4 million barrels and commercial crude stocks fell 49.1 million, so total U.S. crude stocks fell 181.5 million. Total stocks fell in 25 of the 29 weeks. But commercial stocks rose in 10 of them, weeks in which a reader looking only at the commercial line would have seen a build.

The SPR supplied between 50 and 73 percent of the weekly decline in these eight weeks, the highest share coming in the week ending May 22. The commercial stock fell with it, which fits a market in which SPR oil was moving out as fast as refiners and exporters could use it. The data cannot say whether commercial stocks would have fallen further without the releases. A related caution for the Wednesday report is that the headline total includes the reserve, so a week with a large SPR draw can show a large total draw that is policy, not demand.

What a barrel count means in days

Cover in days is the way the reserve is usually described, and it depends entirely on what is divided into it. The IEA’s requirement, which DOE quotes, is 90 days of import protection counting public and industry stocks. DOE’s Quick Facts says that the 411 million barrels held at the end of 2025 was about 125 days of crude net imports. Table 8 divides both the end-of-2025 level and the October 16, 2026 level by five yardsticks, each from EIA’s 2025 annual series, so the denominator is explicit.

On DOE’s denominator the 2025 stock is 125 days, and 411 divided by 125 implies 3.3 million barrels per day of net imports. The EIA’s annual net crude import figure for 2025 is 2.2 million, which gives 186 days. The sources do not explain the difference, and this page does not choose between them: it shows both, and the table’s other rows put the same stock against gross imports (46 days at today’s level), refinery input (17 days) and production (21 days). The row that cannot mislead is the last one: at the maximum nominal rate, the October 16 stock would take 64 days to empty. A reader who sees one figure of days without its denominator has not been told how large the reserve is.

Days of cover is a ratio of a stock to a flow, not a forecast, and the EIA’s Short-Term Energy Outlook projections of the reserve are not reported weekly values, so none is used here. The October 16 figure will be superseded every Wednesday; DOE’s Quick Facts page and the EIA weekly series are where to read the next one. The price side of the same months is in the oil price history guide, and the disruption the releases responded to is in the Hormuz flows guide. This page replaces the earlier SPR depletion mathematics article, an illustrative explainer without dated reserve data, and that address now forwards here.

Data and sources: U.S. Energy Information Administration, U.S. Ending Stocks of Crude Oil in SPR (WCSSTUS1 weekly; MCSSTUS1 annual), and weekly crude series WCRFPUS2, WCRIMUS2, WCREXUS2, WCRRIUS2 and WCESTUS1, through the weeks ending October 16, 2026, and annual series MCRIMUS2, MCRNTUS2, MCRRIUS2 and MCRFPUS2 for 2025, from the EIA petroleum bulk data file updated October 22, 2026, checked October 23, 2026. U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Petroleum Reserves, SPR Quick Facts (inventory by site as of October 16, 2026; 714 million barrel authorized capacity; 726.6 million peak; 411 million barrels and about 125 days at December 31, 2025; 4.4 million barrels per day; 13 days; IEA 90-day requirement; $29.70 average price paid) and History of SPR Releases, checked October 23, 2026. DOE press releases: March 13, 2026, April 1, April 9, April 30, June 10, September 29 and October 10, and the Petroleum Reserves News listing, checked October 23, 2026. The IEA’s own announcement pages returned an access error on October 23, 2026, so the IEA action is described only as DOE’s releases describe it. The Table 6 balance, cover in days, shares and premium arithmetic are this page’s calculations.