By Timothy Gardner and Jarrett Renshaw
HOUSTON (Reuters) – U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on Monday he was planning to work with Congress on cancelling previously mandated sales from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as one way to address low stockpiles.
Congress has mandated some 100 million barrels in sales from the reserve, the world’s largest emergency stockpile of crude oil, with a 7 million barrel sale set for fiscal year 2026-2027, and further sales through 2031.
“Anything with Congress is more difficult, you know, and that takes time, but absolutely,” Wright told Reuters in an interview at the CERAWeek conference.
It would take five to seven years and $20 billion to refill the reserve, Wright said. U.S. President Donald Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden sold nearly 300 million barrels from the SPR, including its largest sale ever after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.
Due to ongoing maintenance issues, refilling the reserve takes more time than selling from it, Wright said. The Energy Department said on Friday that Wright would not ask Congress for $20 billion for purchases all in one go, and that working with lawmakers to buy oil could take years.
Wright also wants to boost U.S. exports of liquefied natural gas. Trump talked up a proposed $44 billion Alaska LNG project in his address to Congress last week.
Trump has said Japan, South Korea and other countries want to partner with the United States in a “gigantic” natural gas pipeline in Alaska, claiming they would invest “trillions of dollars each.” The Alaska LNG project needs an 800-mile pipeline to bring gas from Alaska’s north to send it to customers in Asia and no final investment decisions have yet been made.
Wright said all options for supporting the project are on the table including a potential loan guarantee from his department’s Loan Programs Office, or LPO.
“The administration will look at every way we can to get a large infrastructure project like that built,” Wright said, adding that included diplomacy and a potential loan guarantee, which would help the project get financing at a lower rate than offered by banks.
U.S. Senators Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan secured a provision in a 2021 infrastructure law for Alaska LNG to be eligible for federal loan guarantee of roughly $30 billion that is indexed to inflation.
If the Trump administration uses the LPO for Alaska LNG, it would mark a policy change from his first term as president when he did not significantly tap the LPO. Biden frequently used the LPO and signed legislation to swell its financial aid to hundreds of billions of dollars.
Wright also downplayed regional opposition to new natural gas pipelines in regions like the U.S. Northeast, saying he did not expect it to get in the way of building new projects.
“Everyone wants lower energy prices. Everyone in New York, everyone in New England,” he said.
Trump, on his first day in office, signed an emergency energy declaration intended to expand federal powers to push through big projects like generators, pipelines, and transmission to meet rising power demand.
Wright, who stepped down from the board of small modular reactor company Oklo when he was confirmed as energy secretary, said the administration was also likely to give the emerging nuclear technology both financial and regulatory support, but did not detail how.
Small modular reactors are seen as a potential partial solution to meeting soaring power demand from data centers, but there are no commercial plants yet.
(Reporting by Timothy Gardner; Editing by Nia Williams)
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