The U.S. Department of Energy said on Monday it had finalized a contract to purchase 4.65 million barrels of crude oil for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, for delivery to the Bayou Choctaw site in Louisiana during the last three months of the year.
Exxon Mobil will supply 3.9 million barrels of the contract, while Macquarie Commodities Trading US LLC will supply the rest, the DOE said. The average purchase price for the oil is about $76.92 per barrel, the DOE said.
The purchase is the latest in a string of contracts intended to refill the nation’s emergency oil stockpile following a record release of 180 million barrels in 2022. That sale was an effort to control gasoline prices that spiked to more than $5.00 a gallon after President Vladimir Putin ordered Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But it also reduced the reserves to the lowest in 40 years.
The DOE said it has since repurchased a total of 43.25 million barrels at an average price of around $77 a barrel, after having sold the oil at around $95 a barrel during the 2022 release, which it called a “good deal for taxpayers.”
U.S. crude futures were trading around $76 a barrel on Monday.
The DOE has also worked with Congress to cancel a previously planned sale of 140 million barrels of oil from the reserve, something the department says should count toward the refilling of the stockpile.
“As promised, we have secured the 180 million barrels back to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve released in response to Putin’s war in Ukraine – and we accomplished this while getting a good deal for taxpayers and maintaining the readiness of the world’s largest Strategic Petroleum Reserve,” said Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm.
The DOE said it was likely to continue buying oil for the reserve into next year, using the roughly $1.2 billion that it has remaining in its revenue account. At current prices, that fund could cover purchases of around 15 million barrels.
The DOE has previously said that it wants to buy oil at $79 a barrel or less.
As of July 19, the SPR contained about 374.4 million barrels of oil, the highest level since the end of 2022, but well below the typical 600-700 million level of the last decade when the United States relied more heavily on imports.
(Reporting by Richard Valdmanis Editing by Marguerita Choy and Tomasz Janowski)