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The Strategic Petroleum Reserve took its first delivery on 21 July 1977: about 412,000 barrels of Saudi Arabian light crude, pumped into salt caverns near Lake Charles, Louisiana. Construction had started that April, when the government bought up existing caverns along the Gulf Coast rather than wait to dig its own.

DOE had asked for up to 30 million barrels of sweet crude from West Hackberry on 9 April 2026; eight days later it awarded contracts for 26 million of them, with deliveries starting at once. By then more than 10 million barrels of the wider exchange had already reached the market.