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Two years after the Arab oil embargo, the Energy Policy and Conservation Act set up a federal emergency oil stockpile and gave the President the power to order it sold when supply is severely interrupted. Ford called the bill imperfect but signed it anyway, to end "the long debate over national energy policy".

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.

Hours after announcing allied air attacks on Iraq, President Bush ordered the first emergency sale in the reserve's history. The Energy Department released its sales notice on 17 January 1991 and eventually sold 17.3 million barrels to 13 companies, half of what it offered: bids for sour crude came in too low to accept.

Hurricane Katrina shut in about half of US domestic oil production and knocked out refineries and import terminals, so on 2 September 2005 President Bush found a severe energy supply interruption and ordered a sale. DOE offered 30 million barrels and sold 11 million; the first oil left Bryan Mound on 26 September.

With Libyan production off the market, the International Energy Agency put 60 million barrels into it on 23 June 2011, and the US share came out of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The auction was heavily oversubscribed: more than 90 offers came in for 30.2 million barrels of light sweet crude, and 15 companies took delivery.

Four days after Russia invaded Ukraine, Biden ordered crude out of the SPR as the US share of an IEA release of 60 million barrels. It did not stop there: by that summer 180 million barrels had gone, the biggest emergency sale the reserve had ever made, and it left the stockpile at levels not seen since the 1980s.

Thirty-two IEA member nations agreed on 11 March 2026 to release 400 million barrels between them after Iranian attacks slowed tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. The American share was 172 million barrels, the largest US release ever ordered, and Secretary Wright said it would take about 120 days to deliver.

The first tranche of the 172-million-barrel release went out as a request for proposals on 13 March 2026, covering 86 million barrels from Bryan Mound, West Hackberry and Bayou Choctaw. Bids were due the following Tuesday, and the borrowers must hand the oil back with extra barrels on top.

DOE went back to the market on 1 April 2026 for a third exchange, this one drawn entirely from the Bryan Mound caverns outside Freeport, Texas. Bidders had until the following Monday, and a limited Jones Act waiver let them move the crude on foreign-flagged ships to get it to refiners faster.

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.

After soliciting up to 92.5 million barrels from all four storage sites - the largest single exchange in the reserve's history - DOE awarded contracts for 53.3 million on 11 May 2026, at a return premium of about 28 per cent. That is 15.1 million extra barrels owed back to the stockpile.

Weekly Energy Department data published on 10 August 2026 put the Strategic Petroleum Reserve at 298.7 million barrels, down 6.1 million in a week and the lowest reading in the EIA series since January 1983. The stockpile had held about 415 million barrels before the Iran war began.