In 1975, President Gerald Ford signed a law creating the United States' first emergency stash of crude oil. Today the US is one of the world's largest producers and a major seller, not just a buyer, of oil but still has its stash.
At the time, OPEC, the cartel of oil-producing nations, had a stranglehold on the world's supply of crude. Today the United States is one of the world's largest producers and a major seller, not just a buyer, of oil. But the United States still has its stash. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve contains 645 million barrels — the world's largest backup oil supply.Scenes like this one in Martinez, California, were common in September 1973.
The strategic reserve, or SPR, is a complex of four sites along the Texas and Louisiana gulf coasts that have deep underground storage caverns, 2,000 to 4,000 feet below the surface. The most oil the SPR has ever held was 727 million barrels in 2009.Read MoreOnly the US president can order the SPR to be used, and that has happened only three times. The SPR was most recently used in June 2011 when civil unrest in Libya unsettled global oil exports.
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