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Comment by GiorgioG | Hacker News Reader

To provide some context, the US uses about 20m barrels of oil per day. We have about 35 days worth of oil reserves. It seems if there was some kind of extended emergency where we could not produce oil, 772m barrels would be wholly inadequate.

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We have trillions of barrels of oil in shale and oil fields waiting to get pumped when prices go back up.

they arent going to distribute the oil to civilians so they can drive to the beach or buy groceries, this oil would go directly to military operations that would then establish more long term oil production

As we should be learning right now with medical supplies, the point of these reserves is not primarily to keep us at normal levels in the face of long-term supply disruption (which is nearly impossible for most things at scale), but to be able to cover the time we need 3x normal capacity to give us 10 days to plan a sustainable response.

The strategic oil reserve has never been necessary given we are a massive oil producer.

From some time in the 1950s or early 1960s to a few years ago, the US consumed more oil than it produced. I am going to guess that for more than half of that time, it produced less than half of the oil it consumed.

Then US companies figured out how to profit from extracting from shale oil deposits (by fracking).

The strategic oil reserve doesn’t protect us from being a net oil importer. It’s always going to be a tiny fraction of 1% of our existing supplies, and a small percentage of our annual consumption.

It literally does nothing but subsidize US oil producers and mildly reduce price spikes for limited periods.

Just through the 60s? I'm pretty sure the US consumed more oil than it produced all the way into late 2018 when it became a net exporter:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-becomes-net-exporter-of-oil...

Edit: Nevermind, misread the sentence. Keeping this for the link.

Right, now look at where "from" and "to" are in my sentence.

During and for years after WWII, the US was a major net exporter of oil, which is why I felt the need to specify the approximate start (some time in the 1950s or early 1960s) of the US's dependence on imported oil.

Oops, sorry.

No need to apologize. If you didnt catch my meaning then probably many other readers didnt either.

It has been used multiple times:

https://www.energy.gov/fe/services/petroleum-reserves/strate...

US production rates of oil have varied dramatically over the years.

We make a lot of N95 masks too, and yet, here we are...

Never? We only recently became a huge producer because of shale. Otherwise we were a net importer

How does a strategic reserve protect us from being an importer?

Answer: it doesn’t.

The idea, generally speaking, isn't to provide all the country's oil for a period of a time. In fact, there's only pumping capacity to remove about 5m barrels/day from the reserve.

The point of the reserve is to be used with smaller withdrawals to stabilize the system over time or provide a buffer in case of short term disruption.

Interestingly, would like to know how manny barrels we are using currently with almost a complete lockdown ? I am just 1 anecdote but I have only driven my car twice in past 2 weeks and total of less than 15 miles. In general, I drive 20 miles per day on an average.

I'd imagine that in such a situation, a lot of things would be shut down - there's a good chance it'd last a little more than 35 days when use is lower.

And North American production will ramp up as quickly as possible. We've seen very expensive oil in the last decade which has made a variety of alternative extraction methods economical. Not entirely sure how a situation could arise where oil production is impossible.

Exactly. For example, right now we're operating at somewhere around 25% less transit than normal [1] and that's without even specifically targeting reducing oil consumption. In an oil emergency situation we could probably get to 30-40% reduction pretty quickly.

[1] https://www.geotab.com/blog/impact-of-covid-19/

Of that 20m/day normal use, the reserves can only bring up about 4.5m/day, so that’s more like 150 days.

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