Lani62. I see your point, however it appears from this excerpt from the undermentioned article that a lot of the stockpile is of light sweet crude something which the US has a lot of now coming out of the ground.
" Yet while the SPR’s roughly 700 million barrels in storage would last much longer in an emergency than they would have done in the previous decade, the reserve’s other shortcomings have grown as the US energy situation has evolved in the last several years. For starters, it holds too much light sweet crude oil. Once in short supply, the US now has such abundant supplies of this grade, thanks to the shale production in North Dakota and Texas, that US refineries may eventually not be able to refine it all, without expensive upgrades or under-utilization of their costly conversion hardware."
