The U.S. Department of Energy is negotiating contracts with nine U.S. oil producers to store a total of 23 million barrels of their produced oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), to help U.S. oil producers with storage availability amid the huge demand loss in the pandemic, DOE said on Tuesday. U.S. oil producers are currently suffering from the lowest oil prices in years, with the benchmark WTI Crude in the low $20s despite this weekend’s historic global oil deal for which U.S. President Donald Trump is also taking credit. The initial idea of the U.S. Administration to help the U.S. oil patch was to buy 77 million barrels of oil from American producers to remove some of the overhang in the market, fill the SPR to its maximum capacity with the cheapest oil in years, and help oil producers. After the plan failed to get funding for oil […]