U.S. Congress should debate whether to reduce the emergency crude oil stored in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), because America’s oil production boom has diminished its reliance on imports, U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry said at a Senate hearing on Tuesday. “Do we need that big of a reserve, particularly with the growth of the pipeline infrastructure we have and the growth in that infrastructure that’s going to occur over the next decade?” Reuters quoted Secretary Perry as saying at a hearing before the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is a U.S. Government complex of four sites with deep underground storage caverns created in salt domes along the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coasts. As of March 29, 2019, the SPR held a total of 649.1 million barrels of crude oil, including 254.6 million barrels of sweet crude and 394.5 million barrels […]