A Plan to Lower Gas Prices—And (Maybe) Help the Climate
If you drive along the Gulf of Mexico from Corpus Christi, Texas, to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, you will pass four U.S. government sites that look like nothing special—a bland patch of concrete, a few office buildings, some oil silos huddled together. These facilities conceal something extraordinary: a network of cathedral-esque caverns carved into underground rock salt that can collectively hold more than 700 million barrels of oil. Together, these caverns, which are wide and deep enough to swallow the Empire State Building, make up the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a marvel of American engineering and the largest emergency stockpile of crude oil anywhere in the world.
The Strategic Petroleum Reserve, or SPR, is one of those pieces of infrastructure that nobody needs to think about in ordinary times. And for the most part, nobody has. Created after the 1973 oil embargo, the reserve has become a kind of all-purpose cushion for oil supplies in times of war or natural disaster. But in recent months, it has become a lifeline for President Joe Biden. Since April, the government has sold.
