IEA - RELEASE 400 million BARRELS OF OIL - LARGEST OF ALL TIME - Filenews 12/3
The International Energy Agency has finally made the decision to release 400 million barrels of oil from strategic reserves. This is the biggest release of all time.
The IEA convened an extraordinary meeting of its member countries on Wednesday morning to discuss a possible "decision" on the release of strategic oil reserves, and the executive director, Fatih Birol, announced that the release was unanimously approved by all 32 member countries, as expected. The decoupling will start gradually with priority given to the countries most in need. "The challenges facing the oil market are unprecedented in scale. That is why I am very happy that the IEA member states responded with an urgent collective action of unprecedented magnitude," Birol stressed. According to what he said, the members maintain emergency reserves of more than 1.2 billion barrels, while there are an additional 600 million barrels of industrial reserves, which are kept under a government obligation
In the recent past, there has been a similar action four more times, but even if all the barrels are added together, they do not reach the figure of 400 million.
In 1999 and after Operation Desert Storm, in the Gulf War, about 17 million barrels were released. In 2005, after Hurricane Katrina in the US, a natural disaster that brought production to its knees in the Gulf of Mexico, about 60 million barrels were released.
In 2011, during the civil war in Libya (Arab Spring), another 60 million barrels were released.
In 2022 and after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a total of about 182.7 million barrels were released to contain the energy crisis.
