I seem to recall a bunch of stories in ~2008 about how the "Strategic Reserve" wasn't enough to affect market prices etc. Has it got bigger? Has the market got smaller? was the media reporting bullshit for an agenda then, or are they now?
The shortsightedness of people is amazing: since the '70s, when oil prices go down, people reliably buy wasteful and large cars. Then they go up, and people reliably do the opposite.
In the last ten years, everyone and their brother bought vanity pickup trucks and SUVs. Now, suddenly, everyone is shocked, shocked that oil prices have gone back up. Will anyone ever learn?
I was reading car and drivers list of worst mpg vehicles today, not surprisingly pick up trucks are awful. 16mpg highway with giant gas tanks.
No wonder people feel the pain when they have to pay like $200 to fill up and be able to drive ~400miles. I don’t have sympathy except for the ones that legitimately use it for work. Otherwise it’s massively wasteful and all that’s different now is they can feel how wasteful their car is.
Is that the reason, though? I heard on the news (unfortunately don't remember where) that oil production decreased when people were driving less, then as people resumed driving, production didn't increase as fast as demand.
Which would make sense to me because there have been a ton of situations where some pandemic event has caused some previously generally stable thing to shift (up or down) to some new level, then we have chaos as other things try to adapt and find a new equilibrium. Then when the pandemic stops forcing that thing to an unusual level, it springs back toward its normal level, and again other things take time to adapt and find an equilibrium.
So actually we seem to get two edge-triggered periods of chaos where something shifts from value V1 to V2 (that's one edge trigger) and then shifts back from V2 to V1-ish (the other edge trigger).
And if you look at crude oil prices over the last few years, they were lower during 2020 than in previous years. Now they are higher. So that fits the pattern I'm describing.
> Now, suddenly, everyone is shocked, shocked that oil prices have gone back up.
We also had ten years worth of truck and SUV purchases prior to inauguration day early this year, and I recall everyone paying almost a dollar and a half less per gallon during that time period.
> The shortsightedness of people is amazing: since the '70s, when oil prices go down, people reliably buy wasteful and large cars. Then they go up, and people reliably do the opposite.
You don't want people to respond to economic incentives? That means there is no point to adding gas taxes to incentivize fuel efficiency - or do you believe that people only respond to increasing gas prices and not decreasing prices?
How, in your view, would such an asymmetric response function work?
Gas (RBOB) is a refined product. The SPR is crude. There is obviously a relationship between them but it is a complex, laggy function of refinery capacity, distribution, etc. It will at least effect spot crude prices at the relevant delivery points.
To put this in perspective, US daily oil consumption is 18 million barrels. So a 50 million barrel release from the strategic reserve is less than a 3 day supply.
“ Of the total 32 million barrels will be an exchange over the next several months, while 18 million barrels will be an acceleration of a previously authorized sale “
Here’s some info on consumption [1]. But this is basically politics at its peak b/c when Biden runs for reelection he’ll need it as a talking point. The “strategic reserve” is something Americans have latched on to as an idea. They won’t look at the numbers. His opponent won’t either. It’s just showbiz.
The talking point only works if has the effect of actually lowering prices DURING the election.
he is pulling this trigger way to early if he expects to use it as a 2022 talking point as any positive price effects this causes will likely be exhausted by then, and he systemic failures of macro economic policies will likely make things much worse by 2022 elections anyway.
Has anyone heard from the President a message to reduce consumption in the U.S.? We waste so much, there need be no hint of tightening belts or doing without things we like. Most Americans could drop our emissions and waste 50 percent just improving our lives. We live this huge lie that consumption correlates with quality of life, health, or happiness for most of us.
We could improve our lives by cutting out most of the useless, pointless junk instead of solving every problem by burning more fossil fuels.
> Has anyone heard from the President a message to reduce consumption in the U.S.? We waste so much, there need be no hint of tightening belts or doing without things we like. Most Americans could drop our emissions and waste 50 percent just improving our lives. We live this huge lie that consumption correlates with quality of life, health, or happiness for most of us.
To be blunt, I wouldn't vote for a politician that told me I need to reduce my quality of life, nor would most people, which is why you never hear a politician say things like that. The average person does not want to hear that they need to tighten their belt so that someone else's belt now or in the future can be loosened. That's just not how people work.
> To be blunt, I wouldn't vote for a politician that told me I need to reduce my quality of life
Yeah, that is unfortunately a very common sentiment and a large part of why things continue to suck in the world and are unlikely to get better. It isn't just climate, people are far too selfish in pretty much every aspect of society and the whole is suffering because of it. I wish I could be optimistic about the future, but then I see comments like yours and am reminded that humanity has well earned it's pain. When the possibility of success approaches zero, giving up is a rational alternative to trying.
> The average person does not want to hear that they need to tighten their belt so that someone else's belt now or in the future can be loosened. That's just not how people work.
People did it during WWII, not just by participating in combat but by donating their possessions to the war effort, and that was within living memory of people still alive today. Saying "that's just not how people work" assumes that it has always been so. I think something has changed since the 40s to make any kind of sacrifice for the community look like anathema to most.
In 1973, when OPEC fully embargoed the Netherlands (among other countries), the Dutch government instituted "car-free Sundays" for three months in an attempt to curb oil use. It seems to have been fairly popular.
Fossil fuel will die only when the alternatives are better. Focusing positively there is where the effort should be.
So reduce environmental review for solar, massively reduce red tape for fission, invest in fusion, and invest in carbon capture technology are the main things here IMO.
We should strive for energy abundance, not austerity.
Europeans have half the ecological footprint of Americans, yet our quality of life is dramatically higher. It might have some correlation, but at a certain point that correlation stops and it just gets gratuitous.
Correlation does not imply causation. Just purely saying “consume more and you will have a higher quality of life” seems off. Consuming the right things is important imo.
> Has anyone heard from the President a message to reduce consumption in the U.S.? We waste so much
Who is 'we'? It's big companies and the military that are causing massive amounts of resource waste and overuse. Telling the working class to 'improve their lives' is quite ridiculous. This is a production problem at a systems level, not an individual consumption problem. That narrative of individual change is simply gaslighting by the propertied class.
>>>It's big companies and the military that are causing massive amounts of resource waste and overuse.
While often wasteful, the military is only 4% of US GDP,[1] and almost 40% of its expenditures is Pay & Benefits.[2] The rest, about $400 Billion, is <2% of the US's ~$21 Trillion economy (real 2019 GDP). It's...interesting...to single that sector of the economy out in particular.
Big business is wasteful on our behalf. If I fly on plane, you'd blame American Airlines, but it was 100% my consumption. Are you going to blame me or Toyota for my V8 4Runner? I bought it.
You might think, "well, its American Airlines choice not to use carbon neutral biofuel!" But consumers always pick the lower priced flight. So if AA cost 15 bucks more than UA because of green fuel, 90% of the country would just fly UA.
You can blame certain companies for lying about global warming or polluting even when it wouldn't raise costs. But that doesn't absolve you from your role in consumption.
While I agree in general, I think as long as the rest of us persist in our mindset that we don't need to change we will resist all efforts to do so on a societal level as well.
Where have you been the last 2 years? People got pissed from being told to wear a mask to help slow the spread of a disease. I think it's safe to say telling people to tighten their belts when it comes to consumption would piss off members of all political parties.
I can imagine a good portion of the population would not be inclined to take the advice of any President on self-moderation. The number of people struggling to keep their head above water is very high.
The best chance we have is to make the environmentally friendly approaches profitable, especially if it creates local jobs and opportunity.
This is something that people will need to come to their own senses about. Politicians run to get elected/re-elected and economy is almost always the #1 driver for building a platform.
In the economic sense, if everyone reduced consumption then unemployment would go up, GDP down, recession, etc…
This is just my observation of how some dominoes might fall. There will always be upsides and downsides.
that’s what jimmy carter did and it didn’t work out great for him whether or not it’s true. it’s the same reason politicians don’t tell americans to get exercise or eat healthy
Improve our lives according to whom? You? Have you cut your consumption by 50% this year? Have you installed solar (if you own a house)? Have you started growing your own vegetables? Have you bought a house that is 50% smaller to reduce heating/cooling needs? Do you want someone telling you that you have to do all these things and more?
> Have you cut your consumption by 50% this year? Have you installed solar (if you own a house)? Have you started growing your own vegetables? Have you bought a house that is 50% smaller to reduce heating/cooling needs? Do you want someone telling you that you have to do all these things and more?
My consumption isn't very high to begin with, there wasn't much to cut. My house is shaded by large trees and solar wouldn't provide much benefit, so instead I've cut electrical use. I do have a garden, yes. I have a modestly sized house and 2 roomates.
Could I do more? Sure, not that it'd make much difference with the apparent sentiment being "fuck the future if it makes things inconvenient for me now". Especially for the incredibly well off portions of our society that consume ludicrously more resources than the median and then tell us all there's nothing we can do.
Sadly, I'm convinced that only an authoritarian dictatorship could actually pull this off, and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't like that either. I'd much prefer if people would just not throw up their hands because they're asked to be a little less comfortable for the sake our descendants' future.
On my blog https://www.joshuaspodek.com I post my electric bills, that I pick up litter daily, that I haven't flown since 2016, haven't filled a load of garbage since 2019, and more. Most importantly, that each of these changes improves my life. Or watch my TEDx talks on sustainability leadership: https://joshuaspodek.com/tedx.
Leadership, not individual action is the point. Yet more important and magnifying my effect, I lead workshops in food deserts, coach executives and politicians, and host a podcast helping change American and global culture from the attitude I read in your post, that sustainability and stewardship are burdens, deprivation, or sacrifice, to expecting it will improve their lives, help the most vulnerable, and create stability and abundance.
Politicians have to be seen as "doing something" even if that something isn't productive or even is counterproductive. At least no one is messing with the clocks again. Maybe there was enough blowback from the last DST change for political points that no one will resort to it again.
The US bought 77M barrels of crude oil in March 2020 under a Trump executive order. The purchases were directly from US producers, but WTI was trading around $20-25/barrel in that period. Selling 50M barrels now is going to profit the country by $50/barrel (before holding and transport costs), so by all measures this has been a good trade for the country!
While researching this I was also reminded that we are already selling 20M+ barrels per year from the SPR. Many major budget bills over the past 7 years included a sale from the SPR as part of the funding. We also need to pay $450M for overdue maintenance on the SPR itself - and you guessed it, that was "paid for" by selling 10M barrels from the SPR this year. This is not a petroleum reserve anymore, this is a budget reserve for Congress to balance its bills.
If you happen to own a unique storage facility for a (somewhat) volatile asset, exploiting it to produce income for the country seems like a smart idea. I also see no issue using the same profits to pay for the maintenance of the storage facility itself. What is the problem, exactly?
Not to mention the 10M barrels we sold just to pay for the upkeep (it's like selling gas from my car to pay for new brakes - we shouldn't be bartering oil for maintenance expenses).
But a trade is a trade - had they not bought the 77M the SPR would have dropped by 74M rather than the increase of 3M.
Personally when I came across internet discussions about Norwegian oil production, it is mostly pointed to CO2.
In case US - topic is usually about profit.
50 million? Given the USA's consumption, that doesn't feel like much.
That aside, what's worrisome is that just days ago there was a climate agreement. Again. But - once again - the economy comes first. When is this cycle going to stop?
This administration has already stated that they aren't going to do much to lower gas prices, that this is just a growing period to encourage investment in green energy. Besides, Americans have been saving too much these past couple of years, what's a little bump in gas prices? All those people living at the poverty line should be just fine. The economy will recover.
/s
In all seriousness, I grew up in a household where the car was always on E, rising gas prices were sometimes the difference between eating or not eating. All goods will be more expensive, and this will have the biggest impact on the poor. Squeezing the lower and middle class now does not seem like the answer.
This is something that is often overlooked. A lot of HN commenters like to be smug about how they don't use any gas, and all we need is a few more bike lanes. As if every single thing they have ever bought isn't trucked in to local stores.
An increase in energy prices affects _everything_. Sharp increases in oil prices is a pretty reliable leading indicator of a recession[1].
> In all seriousness, I grew up in a household where the car was always on E, rising gas prices were sometimes the difference between eating or not eating.
The solution for that is not to artificially subsidize gas consumption (which has its host of side effects on a geopolitical scale, from CO2 targets to dependencies on dictatorships), but to raise minimum wages and tax the rich to fund social security systems worth their name and actually usable public transport.
> Squeezing the lower and middle class now does not seem like the answer.
I agree. But we can't keep having the same approach and expecting change. It's been ~50 yrs since the oil crisis (read: wake up call) of the 70's. Yet here we are again...don't hurt the little guy\gal...don't hurt the Big Guys / Gals either. Well, Mother Nature is ok to hurt. She doesn't push back. Not :(
Not only is it not that much (for reference, world oil consumption is ~100 million b/d[0]), after releasing the oil it is gone and with it the threat of being able to release it in the future.
I guess, the most sustainable solution to high oil prices in the short term is to implement a deal with Iran. Iran's capacity is estimated to be 3.8 million b/d[1]. An unknown factor though, is how much of that is being bought up by China already.
The lacking investment to replace rotting infrastructure is already showing in some OPEC member states[2]. Unless we put more effort into reducing demand the problem will only grow worse in the future. And in my view, current efforts to reduce reliance on oil are far from sufficient.
The US can always elect to subsidize fracking and oil sand mining, should it feel a need for mid-term capacity expansion. And in any case, everyone and their dog is looking to reduce their dependence on oil as far as possible as investors demand action on climate change.
Not to pick on you specifically, but the “economy vs climate” dichotomy is nonsense. The climate crisis is an economic crisis. The real dichotomy is near-term economic issues vs long term economic issues. Do we stop incurring credit card debt now or do we go bankrupt in the future?
We can't "pay off the debt" in the short term without significant and long lasting instability. So the better analogy might be "do we go bankrupt now" or "do we go bankrupt later," and given everything else that's going on in the world today, "later" is definitely preferable.
Well, to be fair, some sub-corporation buys it. It's insured which is often gov subsidizing at this point. In other words, like all good entrepreneurs, they understand the risk and mitigate it.
> "Would that I had the magic wand on this," Granholm [U.S. Energy Secretary] told Bloomberg TV, laughing in a response to a question on what her plan was to raise U.S. oil output. "That is hilarious,".
It would depend on the context. I think you could reasonably say you can't wave a wand to change domestic oil production and also say you can use the strategic reserve, which I don't think has much of anything to do with production. Those don't seem to obviously contradict each other.
>> The coordinated release between the U.S., India, China, Japan, Republic of Korea and the United Kingdom is the first such move of its kind.
And yet OPEC is a cartel and would be illegal in the US ;-) This move would probably get brought before the WTO but all the countries involved are big players there... It the world economy on the brink?
>The production controls of the IOGCC and the Texas Railroad Commission have been cited as precursors to the establishment of OPEC's caps on member state oil production.
Readit News
In the last ten years, everyone and their brother bought vanity pickup trucks and SUVs. Now, suddenly, everyone is shocked, shocked that oil prices have gone back up. Will anyone ever learn?
The best selling cars for quite some time have been decently fuel efficient in the US.
Even when gas prices are expensive - the US has never been selling a lot of cars like the Fiat 500.
No wonder people feel the pain when they have to pay like $200 to fill up and be able to drive ~400miles. I don’t have sympathy except for the ones that legitimately use it for work. Otherwise it’s massively wasteful and all that’s different now is they can feel how wasteful their car is.
Which would make sense to me because there have been a ton of situations where some pandemic event has caused some previously generally stable thing to shift (up or down) to some new level, then we have chaos as other things try to adapt and find a new equilibrium. Then when the pandemic stops forcing that thing to an unusual level, it springs back toward its normal level, and again other things take time to adapt and find an equilibrium.
So actually we seem to get two edge-triggered periods of chaos where something shifts from value V1 to V2 (that's one edge trigger) and then shifts back from V2 to V1-ish (the other edge trigger).
And if you look at crude oil prices over the last few years, they were lower during 2020 than in previous years. Now they are higher. So that fits the pattern I'm describing.
We also had ten years worth of truck and SUV purchases prior to inauguration day early this year, and I recall everyone paying almost a dollar and a half less per gallon during that time period.
You don't want people to respond to economic incentives? That means there is no point to adding gas taxes to incentivize fuel efficiency - or do you believe that people only respond to increasing gas prices and not decreasing prices?
How, in your view, would such an asymmetric response function work?
Dead Comment
“ Of the total 32 million barrels will be an exchange over the next several months, while 18 million barrels will be an acceleration of a previously authorized sale “
So it’s a single day’s supply.
"This is equivalent to approximately 1,069 days of supply of total U.S. petroleum net imports."
Sounds like it might affect market prices if the government decides to use it to lower the price.
As for accurate media reporting... has that ever happened? On anything?
Yep: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves_in_the_United_S...
Doesn't look like enough on its own to justify a change in reporting that much though.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/global_oil.php
he is pulling this trigger way to early if he expects to use it as a 2022 talking point as any positive price effects this causes will likely be exhausted by then, and he systemic failures of macro economic policies will likely make things much worse by 2022 elections anyway.
This is bad all the way around
We could improve our lives by cutting out most of the useless, pointless junk instead of solving every problem by burning more fossil fuels.
To be blunt, I wouldn't vote for a politician that told me I need to reduce my quality of life, nor would most people, which is why you never hear a politician say things like that. The average person does not want to hear that they need to tighten their belt so that someone else's belt now or in the future can be loosened. That's just not how people work.
Yeah, that is unfortunately a very common sentiment and a large part of why things continue to suck in the world and are unlikely to get better. It isn't just climate, people are far too selfish in pretty much every aspect of society and the whole is suffering because of it. I wish I could be optimistic about the future, but then I see comments like yours and am reminded that humanity has well earned it's pain. When the possibility of success approaches zero, giving up is a rational alternative to trying.
People did it during WWII, not just by participating in combat but by donating their possessions to the war effort, and that was within living memory of people still alive today. Saying "that's just not how people work" assumes that it has always been so. I think something has changed since the 40s to make any kind of sacrifice for the community look like anathema to most.
In 1973, when OPEC fully embargoed the Netherlands (among other countries), the Dutch government instituted "car-free Sundays" for three months in an attempt to curb oil use. It seems to have been fairly popular.
Interesting that you interpreted what @spodek said that way, they talked about improving quality of life and you read the complete opposite.
So reduce environmental review for solar, massively reduce red tape for fission, invest in fusion, and invest in carbon capture technology are the main things here IMO.
We should strive for energy abundance, not austerity.
There’s currently ~42 years until the end of oil: https://www.worldometers.info/
Keeping in mind that degrowth isn't going to happen (for good or bad), it probably isn't a great use of time to advocate for it.
At the current rate America consumes food, I'd bet that there's a _negative_ correlation between amount of food consumed and health.
I am saying this as someone who lived for years in the US and now lives again in Europe.
Who is 'we'? It's big companies and the military that are causing massive amounts of resource waste and overuse. Telling the working class to 'improve their lives' is quite ridiculous. This is a production problem at a systems level, not an individual consumption problem. That narrative of individual change is simply gaslighting by the propertied class.
While often wasteful, the military is only 4% of US GDP,[1] and almost 40% of its expenditures is Pay & Benefits.[2] The rest, about $400 Billion, is <2% of the US's ~$21 Trillion economy (real 2019 GDP). It's...interesting...to single that sector of the economy out in particular.
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?locat...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...
You might think, "well, its American Airlines choice not to use carbon neutral biofuel!" But consumers always pick the lower priced flight. So if AA cost 15 bucks more than UA because of green fuel, 90% of the country would just fly UA.
You can blame certain companies for lying about global warming or polluting even when it wouldn't raise costs. But that doesn't absolve you from your role in consumption.
the politicians that are forcing mask use laws have been shown time and time again not wearing masks themselves.
the politicians forcing environmental laws have been shown time and time again leading extravagant environmentally damaging lifestyles.
You can't escape the feeling that these mandates are meant for the poor and not the rich and powerful political class
Yet American emissions per capita are among the highest in the world. Something doesn't add up.
In the economic sense, if everyone reduced consumption then unemployment would go up, GDP down, recession, etc…
This is just my observation of how some dominoes might fall. There will always be upsides and downsides.
A significant portion of politicians would be parroting impeachment minutes after a statement like that.
My consumption isn't very high to begin with, there wasn't much to cut. My house is shaded by large trees and solar wouldn't provide much benefit, so instead I've cut electrical use. I do have a garden, yes. I have a modestly sized house and 2 roomates.
Could I do more? Sure, not that it'd make much difference with the apparent sentiment being "fuck the future if it makes things inconvenient for me now". Especially for the incredibly well off portions of our society that consume ludicrously more resources than the median and then tell us all there's nothing we can do.
Sadly, I'm convinced that only an authoritarian dictatorship could actually pull this off, and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't like that either. I'd much prefer if people would just not throw up their hands because they're asked to be a little less comfortable for the sake our descendants' future.
Here is a graph: https://joshuaspodek.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/ReduceFo...
On my blog https://www.joshuaspodek.com I post my electric bills, that I pick up litter daily, that I haven't flown since 2016, haven't filled a load of garbage since 2019, and more. Most importantly, that each of these changes improves my life. Or watch my TEDx talks on sustainability leadership: https://joshuaspodek.com/tedx.
Leadership, not individual action is the point. Yet more important and magnifying my effect, I lead workshops in food deserts, coach executives and politicians, and host a podcast helping change American and global culture from the attitude I read in your post, that sustainability and stewardship are burdens, deprivation, or sacrifice, to expecting it will improve their lives, help the most vulnerable, and create stability and abundance.
While researching this I was also reminded that we are already selling 20M+ barrels per year from the SPR. Many major budget bills over the past 7 years included a sale from the SPR as part of the funding. We also need to pay $450M for overdue maintenance on the SPR itself - and you guessed it, that was "paid for" by selling 10M barrels from the SPR this year. This is not a petroleum reserve anymore, this is a budget reserve for Congress to balance its bills.
Where can we find the information of the 77M?
Not to mention the 10M barrels we sold just to pay for the upkeep (it's like selling gas from my car to pay for new brakes - we shouldn't be bartering oil for maintenance expenses).
But a trade is a trade - had they not bought the 77M the SPR would have dropped by 74M rather than the increase of 3M.
If your measure is LIFO accounting, sure.
three cheers for good old America Inc.
That aside, what's worrisome is that just days ago there was a climate agreement. Again. But - once again - the economy comes first. When is this cycle going to stop?
/s
In all seriousness, I grew up in a household where the car was always on E, rising gas prices were sometimes the difference between eating or not eating. All goods will be more expensive, and this will have the biggest impact on the poor. Squeezing the lower and middle class now does not seem like the answer.
This is something that is often overlooked. A lot of HN commenters like to be smug about how they don't use any gas, and all we need is a few more bike lanes. As if every single thing they have ever bought isn't trucked in to local stores.
An increase in energy prices affects _everything_. Sharp increases in oil prices is a pretty reliable leading indicator of a recession[1].
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/03/spiking-oil-prices-have-led-...
The solution for that is not to artificially subsidize gas consumption (which has its host of side effects on a geopolitical scale, from CO2 targets to dependencies on dictatorships), but to raise minimum wages and tax the rich to fund social security systems worth their name and actually usable public transport.
I agree. But we can't keep having the same approach and expecting change. It's been ~50 yrs since the oil crisis (read: wake up call) of the 70's. Yet here we are again...don't hurt the little guy\gal...don't hurt the Big Guys / Gals either. Well, Mother Nature is ok to hurt. She doesn't push back. Not :(
The lacking investment to replace rotting infrastructure is already showing in some OPEC member states[2]. Unless we put more effort into reducing demand the problem will only grow worse in the future. And in my view, current efforts to reduce reliance on oil are far from sufficient.
--
[0] - https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/global_oil.php
[1] - https://www.eia.gov/international/content/analysis/countries...
[2] - https://www.argusmedia.com/en/news/2275580-opec-compliance-u...
We can't "pay off the debt" in the short term without significant and long lasting instability. So the better analogy might be "do we go bankrupt now" or "do we go bankrupt later," and given everything else that's going on in the world today, "later" is definitely preferable.
So... magic is real.
And yet OPEC is a cartel and would be illegal in the US ;-) This move would probably get brought before the WTO but all the countries involved are big players there... It the world economy on the brink?
>The production controls of the IOGCC and the Texas Railroad Commission have been cited as precursors to the establishment of OPEC's caps on member state oil production.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Oil_and_Gas_Compact...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1977/04/19/c...
and the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Petroleum_Reserve_(U...