June 9, 2026
The oil reserve in the United States are on pace to hit the lowest levels we’ve seen since President Biden was in office, and globally, oil reserves are forecast to fall to the lowest levels we’ve seen since 2003. That’s according to the latest report from President Trump’s own Energy Information Administration released today.
And surprise — this grim outlook for oil reserves is coming because of the war with Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
Keep in mind, when Russia invaded Ukraine, President Biden tapped the oil reserves, which are technically called the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and really put a major dent in our oil stockpile. At the time, then-candidate Donald Trump railed on him, saying Biden “virtually drained” the SPR and said Biden was just trying to artificially keep gas prices low because the Russia-Ukraine war was causing a major oil disruption.
Well, Trump is now doing the exact same thing. In fact, he has tapped the SPR so much that experts say we could see the same Biden SPR lows in the next week or so. That’s not my opinion — here are the facts from Trump’s own government.
This is a chart of crude oil available in the SPR, dating all the way back to the 1980s. You can see everything was all good until 2022 when the SPR started getting tapped by President Biden. President Biden announced a big SPR drawdown because of the war between Russia and Ukraine, which absolutely disrupted the global oil market and caused gas prices to spike.
But that disruption wasn’t just happening in the United States — it was happening globally, and all our partner countries also started tapping reserves.
The low happened in July of 2023. We had just 346 million barrels of oil in the SPR. That was the lowest level since 1984.
But then Trump came back into office, and you can see a slight recovery in the SPR. But then boom — that dramatic drop right there. That started at the end of February 2026.
You know what else happened at the end of February 2026? If you guessed the war with Iran — ding, ding, ding — you’d be right.
Then, as I told you in this video, in March of 2026 President Trump announced he was going to release 172 million barrels of oil from the SPR over the next four months. And that’s why you see this line going straight down.
As of the last week in May, the SPR has only 357 million barrels. Experts say if the strait remains closed, we are likely going to see the SPR hit those Biden-level lows very soon.
But that’s not all Trump’s Energy Information Administration reported today.
It also released this Short-Term Energy Outlook for the month of June. And despite President Trump repeatedly claiming that we are only days or a week or two away from a deal with Iran and the immediate reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, the very first line of the report from Trump’s own government says, “We make the assumption that the Strait of Hormuz will remain effectively closed in the near term.”
It is forecasting that oil shipments won’t resume through the strait until sometime in the third quarter. However, it’s also forecasting that we won’t see the normal volume of traffic going through the strait until early 2027. 2027!
The Energy Information Administration says because of the limited shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, oil producers in the Middle East have reduced their oil production by more than 11 million barrels a day compared to the production levels we were seeing before the war started.
So, to meet demand, countries around the world have had to tap their oil reserves. The EIA says that drawdown of oil reserves from 38 member nations will result in the lowest oil inventories we’ve seen in 23 years.
And because demand is low, the EIA report found crude oil prices fell in May. But still, the EIA is forecasting we will see an elevated price for a barrel of oil at $105 in June and July.
The EIA says once the strait is reopened and production gradually starts back up, oil prices will get back down to $79 a barrel in 2027.
As a side note, this report also talks about electricity production and the cost of electricity for you. And as I’ve been reporting, electricity costs for you are skyrocketing. They were up 6 percent in the month of April.
But the EIA is forecasting we will see a 3 percent increase in the cost of U.S. electricity generation because of above-average temperatures this summer.
So, not only will your gasoline bill likely be high this summer, but your electricity bill will likely be high as well.
Read today’s EIA Energy Outlook report here.
See SPR inventories from the EIA here.
Trump’s March 2026 announcement about SPR release here.
EIA press release here.
