The federal government created the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in the mid-1970s after the Arab Oil Embargo created a shortage of crude in the U.S. The idea of having a strategic petroleum reserve dates back to World War II. But it wasn’t actually created until 1975, after the Arab Oil Embargo created crude oil and gasoline shortages across the nation. The reserve is composed of four salt cavern complexes with 727 million barrels of storage capacity along the Gulf Coast in Texas and in Louisiana. The reserve can access interstate pipelines to carry oil to nearly half of the nation’s oil refineries, with ships and barges supplying the rest. Each complex includes caverns that range in size from 6 to 35 million barrels of capacity, with the typical cavern being cylindrical, 200 feet […]