Trump'ın Stratejik Petrol Rezerviyle Oynadığı Riskli Kumar

Trump is playing chicken with America's oil reserves

Back in 1975, reeling from the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973, President Gerald Ford signed the Energy Policy and Conservation Act. The law established the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) and framed it as a rainy day fund, made ready for the benefit of the American people should a crisis in supply reach us once more. Today, after two consecutive administrations, our rainy day fund has been drawn down to the lowest levels since 1983. Biden drew down 50 million barrels in response to COVID. The next year, he withdrew an additional 180 million barrels in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the largest release in SPR history, arguing that the move was needed to calm gasoline prices and cushion the shock from the war. Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration (July 2026) Now, President Donald Trump is draining what is left to manage the price and supply shocks of his Iran war. The latest withdrawal — a release of 172 million barrels of oil — brought the SPR down to 311.4 million barrels as of July 17th, leaving the American people less secure just as the conflict threatens to engulf other strategic chokepoints in the Middle East. If the next round of escalation sends oil prices surging, there will be far less of a buffer between a regional war and the price Americans pay at the pump. The SPR at 300 million barrels The SPR consists of crude oil stored inside 60 salt caverns along the Gulf Coast, mostly in Texas and Louisiana. The salt walls of the caverns seal well, leak little, and, because of their unique chemical properties, allow the oil to slowly churn inside the cavern instead of sitting still. This delicate system can maintain up to 727 million barrels for decades — that is, as long as it is being dealt with responsibly. Many experts treat the 300 million barrel threshold as the SPR’s “Minimum Operating Level” because of the precise engineering required to extract the oil. When it drops below this limit, experts in the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) warn that the reserve faces severe “risks to its ability to operate and meet future energy crises.” That’s The problem is practical. To pull crude out, operators pump massive volumes of fresh water into the caverns to hydraulically displace the lighter oil upward. But with each draw cycle, fresh water dissolves the cavern's salt lining, structurally warping the walls, enlarging the cavity over time, and drastically changing the cavern's volume-to-pressure ratio. This aggressive low-level draw cycling accelerates salt erosion and risks causing a catastrophic collapse of the cavern's integrity. Even Trump has publicly acknowledged the risks of a continued drawdown. During a recent press briefing, Trump candidly admitted the vulnerability of the depleted reserves, warning that “we run out of reserves in about 4 weeks.” Limp diplomacy and rudderless escalation Bipartisan voices, from Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) to high-ranking House and Senate Democrats, are sounding the alarm bells about this aggressive drawdown to no avail. Massie explicitly warned that using the reserve globally “to mask the costs of the war risks physically collapsing the very salt caverns holding it.” Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) also warned that the United States must maintain an SPR “that has adequate capacity to absorb shocks like this” instead of leaving consumers to “still feel huge impacts with respect to gasoline prices.” Far from stabilizing the situation, the administration is playing an erratic, high-stakes game of chicken with Iran that has brought the global oil supply to a cliff. The administration tore up the Treasury's June 22nd special general license that had previously allowed Iran to sell crude. Tehran immediately retaliated by escalating a violent, tit-for-tat military cycle, launching drone and missile strikes against three major commercial tankers transiting the Strait of Hormuz, including a Qatari gas carrier left burning off Oman and a Saudi crude vessel. The U.S., in turn, responded aggressively, bombing roughly 90 targets on Iran’s southern coast over a two-day retaliatory blitz. This volatility has driven maritime insurance risk premiums to astronomical highs and chilled shipping fleets. By reneging on large swathes of the Memorandum of Understanding his administration signed with Iran, Trump is plunging global oil markets into the abyss. Rory Johnston, founder of Commodity Context, told RS that crude markets are “pricing in sharply higher risk” as shipping traffic collapses due to another escalation cycle. “Hormuz is miles from solved,” he said. Maritime data shows commercial tanker traffic passing through the Strait of Hormuz has cratered to just one-fifth of pre-war levels, leaving only a fraction of the usual 20 million daily barrels moving through the passage. The U.S. had up until this point served as a global backstop to this supply strain by exporting millions of barrels of oil daily. Now, even that cushion is in question, as the latest figures from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) show a precipitous decline in U.S. crude oil exports, which plummeted by 746,000 daily barrels this week, falling from over 4 million barrels down to just 3.2 million barrels each day. The government has not explained the reason for this steep export drop, but the most likely reason is a need to prevent domestic fuel shortages as the SPR nears its floor. The chokeout scenario We are already operating in a deeply destabilized economic reality in which market uncertainty is fluctuating per-barrel oil prices from the low $70s to high $90s in the span of days. Following a dip in late June and early July amid hopes of a lasting ceasefire, prices have risen back to nearly $100. Worse, there is reason to believe that Chinese consumption of their own billion-barrel stockpiles and Washington’s near emptying of its SPR are keeping prices down artificially. The moment Beijing restarts its imports later this year, that hidden demand will flood back into the market, skyrocketing prices. If Trump continues this tit-for-tat escalation, regional dominoes will topple. We have already seen the dangerous preview: U.S. strikes on Iranian oil processing refineries, then an Iranian retaliation against key oil facilities across Arab Gulf states and attacks on the Saudi Petroline and Emirati ADCOP pipelines, which are used to circumnavigate the strait. The next step on the escalation ladder was taken by the Houthis. By launching a concentrated aerial campaign against Saudi ports and tankers, they are severing the southern route of the Red Sea at the Bab el-Mandeb chokepoint. Bob McNally of Rapidan Energy said such an escalation of the conflict at the region’s chokepoints “would quickly restore crude prices to well above $100, undoing the collapse in risk premium the oil market had priced in in June.” The White House appears to be ignoring the final card that Iran or its allies in the Middle East could play. If Iran finds itself driven into a corner with nothing left to lose, it could resort to targeting the Middle East’s final maritime artery: the Suez Canal. Even a small disruption of the canal can have enormous economic consequences, as the 2021 Ever Given episode demonstrated. Iran or its allies could create a similar crisis by targeting a ship in the canal or even by committing an act of international terrorism, such as intentionally scuttling, booby-trapping, or beaching an ultra-large carrier directly inside the canal's narrowest channels. The result would be the freezing of the third and final sea route out of the Middle East. This is where the SPR story becomes bigger than oil. Yale economist Marnix Amand described Trump’s broader approach to RS as “a man cashing in decades of American hegemony, drawing down long-term reserves of U.S. power, legitimacy, and security for short-term political aims.” The SPR is the physical version of that bargain: a strategic asset built over decades, drained down by a president scrambling to soften the blow from a war he appears unwilling to end.