How Much Crude Oil is in the USA Strategic Petroleum Reserve? How Long To Replenish?

 The USA Strategic Oil reserve is an imporatant safeguard to buffer the effects of any event that could cause problems to the general supply and price of the main products such as diesel or gasoline. So, how's it looking?

Well, apparently..."ok".  Well, we've been in better shape. Below is the latest chart I have as of September 2025 and my check of the guy's comment is below this chart.

We are well into September, but the chart includes only up to and including June.

But we can still study the data to assist us in our conclusion.

The steep drawdown was due to Biden's decision that many claim - and possibly rightly so - to try to keep oil prices down up to the runup of the election. As we know, it was an exercise in futility since he was taken off the ticket and swapped out for Harris. Regardless of where oil prices were or, would have been, would never have saved Harris. 

From the article on RigZone website:

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) latest weekly petroleum status report, which was released on August 27 and included data for the week ending August 22, there were 404.2 million barrels of crude oil in the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) on August 22.

That looks to line up with the chart. Then later, the article says:

On January 29, the Fitch Group sent Rigzone a BMI Q&A format research note. In that note, one of the questions BMI, a unit of Fitch Solutions, asked was ‘Will Trump Fill Strategic Petroleum Reserves ‘Right To The Top’?’.

Offering a response in the note, BMI analysts said, “oil storage levels will rise under Trump, but probably at a slower pace than his rhetoric would suggest”.

“There are logistical constraints to consider, with the American Petroleum Institute (API) estimating strategic reserves would take at least 19 months to replenish,” they added.

So, is he right?  That article was posted at the end of August, so his estimate/prediction is still pretty fresh. The best thing to do is to expand the chart and then extrapolate from there based on the present rate of refilling.  We'll also compare it to the fastest rate of filling.

So, at the present filling rate this puts us to 2035 which is for sure "at least 19 months" but that's at a grindingly slow-as-molasses filling rate. I could have gotten it closer to "the gnat's eye" by crunching the data, but being the lazy engineer that I am, eyeballing the slopes is far easier and faster. But we can see with our own eyes that rate of filling has varied all over the place over the decades.  

What I did was eyeball the slope of the curve from 2023-ish to the previous max and extroplated accordingly (that's the solid red line).  

Now we can look at the fastest filling rate by looking for the steepest part of the curve which was post 1980 (see red dotted oval on left).  If you take that line and extrapolate it out (the dot-dash green line), then we get just over 2.5 years - which is again for sure "at least 19 months".  So we can see the guy was "hedging his bets" not having any better way of phrasing it.

But what do you believe? Them? or your lyin' eyes? We have to ask the question: It may be probable, but is it even possible to reach the fastest filling rate we maintained back in ~1982? Have they replaced the equipment?  Is the equipment even their to potentially reach a meaningful filling rate to get it done relatively quickly? 

For sure, the pumps, piping and instrumentation,and other equipment to EMPTY the reserves are still in place. That's already been proven, thanks to Biden - or whoever it was that really gave the orders - who knows...