Gas prices are still high, diesel is at a record high, and the reserve has shrunk more than 30% in six months. While the reserve held around 415 million barrels of oil in February, it now holds less than 285 million barrels of oil — lower than it has been since the early 1980s.
These rapid drawdowns of oil threaten the salt caverns’ structure, says Samantha Gross, director of the energy security and climate initiative at the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan policy think tank. As the reserves get lower and lower, the physical facilities can get degraded, Gross says: " You can damage them by pumping too much out of them."
It could be argued that Biden shares some of the blame here. My understanding is that his administration released almost half the SPR during Covid to a) help the global economy and b) make a killing (for the government) selling oil when prices were high.
The idea being that they’d replenish the reserves after the crisis, when prices were low/normal again.
The problem with that is that the salt caverns are rated for a limited number of drawdown cycles, so you can’t use it as a bank account. They’re more like an old-timey piggy bank, you break it to use it.
That being said, the biggest difference is of course that Biden didn’t cause Covid. Trump very much started the war with Iran.