> Petroleum reserves are not terribly useful to the economy, aside from two particular cases: war and natural disaster. It's not even clear that the US one is

> Petroleum reserves are not terribly useful to the economy, aside from two particular cases: war and natural disaster. It's not even clear that the US one is useful for war anymore. At the time it was built, the US was a net importer of about 5 million barrels/day of oil, so it made sense to have a buffer allowing the country to weather a few months of an embargo. But now the US is a net exporter. The strategic petroleum reserve can handle withdrawal of about 4 million barrels/day, compared to about 11 million barrels/day of regular US production, which is more than enough for total domestic demand. And the regular production is more geographically distributed and redundant. If anything, just leaving the oil in the ground in its original locations is a better strategic reserve nowadays, compared to pumping it out of one part of the US, only to pump it back into the ground in a different part of the US, into a facility that forms more of a single point of failure, and doesn't even have a faster withdrawal rate. That's just shuffling oil around between different holes in the ground as a kind of make-work job.