Does anyone know exactly how much oil we have in our reserve?

Nevermind, i found it.

The capacity is 700 Million barrels, but it's currently at 651 Million barrels. At the current rate of consumption (20 Million barrels a day), we would run out of oil in 32.5 days... that is, if we did what some of the right wingers want to do and run on just the reserve.

http://www.boston.com/news/politics/presid...cy_oil_reserve/

you are resferring to the "strategic petroleum reserve." That is like a huge oil tank full of oil we imported.

There are billions of unrecovered barrels of oil in LA, OK, TX. \

They were "uneconomical" to recover at $22 a barrel, so the wells were capped many moons ago.

The US has plenty of oil in reserve.

Just no cheap oil.

Actually, Republicans tend to be the ones saying that we shouldn't deplete the reserve. And while 32.5 days of reserves is an important number relative to abating fears of supply shocks, it hardly paints a complete picture.

For example, the market generally has 30-60 days of inventory (outside the government) on hand. Recently, I think we've trended closer to the 60 due to fears about small spare drilling capacity.

On top of that, the U.S. is producing around 7-8 mbpd of oil on its own, and it's usually safe to assume that we probably won't lose more than 30% or so of our imports due to some catastrophic event.

The result is that 650 million barrels is probably an adequate reserve right now. It would be better if we consumed less than we produced at home, but I think that this is about as secure as an oil-importing nation can get.

That's a good thought in itself.

Now with the cold days coming, this thought occurred to me. Is there any such thing as a natural gas reserve? (I did work at an LNG storage faciltity for a while, but I think these critters are rare.)

When i said Republicans, i didn't mean the politicians... i meant Republicans in which i talk to. My bad, i should have explained better.

From what I remember from my Energy course, gas companies do try to store natural gas in the ground, and hope/pray that most of it stays down there and doesn't leak off.

But I mean, an area the size of the strategic reserve might be able to store somewhere around a day's worth of natural gas? At the same time, almost all of our natural gas comes from North America. Hopefully, Canada won't cut us off any time soon. A strategic gas reserve probably didn't make as much sense as a strategic oil reserve did in the past, but as we start importing gas via LNG from countries that might not be quite as friendly as Canada, it's something we might want to think about.

I also think the folks on CNBC were talking about how the Northeast has a heating oil reserve.