SPR Releases Funneled Billions to Same Firms Lobbying Against Them
Companies that spent millions lobbying to keep the Strategic Petroleum Reserve full turned around and bought its crude at auction — then posted record profits.
The single most documented contradiction in the 2022 energy policy record is this: Valero Energy Corporation spent $3.4 million lobbying in 2022, according to OpenSecrets filings, while simultaneously purchasing approximately 7 million barrels of Strategic Petroleum Reserve crude through DOE award notices — crude that the same lobbying apparatus publicly characterized as an inappropriate use of the reserve. At market prices, that crude acquisition represented roughly $700 million in purchases, made at auction from a government seller motivated to move volume quickly.
The Strategic Petroleum Reserve — four salt-cavern storage complexes along the Gulf Coast of Texas and Louisiana, operated under contract by Fluor Federal Petroleum Operations LLC at an approximate $1.6 billion multi-year contract value — exists under legal authority established by the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975 (P.L. 94-163). Its drawdown criteria, codified at 42 U.S.C. § 6241, require a 'severe energy supply interruption.' The Biden administration's March 31, 2022 release of 180 million barrels — the largest single drawdown in SPR history — was authorized by President Biden citing Russia's invasion of Ukraine and coordinated with IEA member nations. Key White House architects included National Economic Council Director Brian Deese, Senior Energy Security Advisor Amos Hochstein, and Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, who holds the statutory sign-off authority.
The lobbying record around that decision is detailed and, in places, specific enough to trace financial interests to individual policy asks. The American Petroleum Institute reported $8.9 million in 2022 lobbying expenditures to OpenSecrets, with its Lobbying Disclosure Act LD-2 filings for Q1 through Q3 2022 explicitly citing 'Strategic Petroleum Reserve policy' as a registered lobbying subject. API's public position was that the SPR 'is not a tool for market manipulation' — a framing that aligned with member companies' interest in sustaining elevated crude prices during a period when WTI had reached approximately $105 per barrel. ExxonMobil, API's largest member, spent $12.1 million on lobbying in 2022 — the highest of any individual energy company tracked by OpenSecrets — and listed 'SPR' explicitly in its LD-2 filings while reporting $55.7 billion in net income, the highest annual profit in company history.
The American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, which reported $5.6 million in 2022 lobbying spend, pursued a more granular objective: its Q2 and Q3 2022 LD-2 filings list 'crude oil quality, SPR releases' as a specific lobbying subject. The technical argument — that the composition of SPR crude disadvantaged certain Gulf Coast refineries — is, in practice, an argument about which companies extract maximum refinery margin from government-sold crude. Refineries optimized for light sweet crude process SPR barrels more profitably than those configured for heavy sour grades. Lobbying to adjust crude quality specifications in SPR release tenders is lobbying to redirect per-barrel profit.
Phillips 66, which spent $3.1 million on lobbying in 2022 per OpenSecrets, holds a structural advantage that no amount of lobbying needed to create: its Clifton Ridge Marine Terminal and Beaumont Terminal infrastructure sits adjacent to SPR storage sites, providing logistical priority in crude extraction. The company won DOE SPR crude purchase awards in 2022, documented in federal contract notices. Marathon Petroleum, at $3.9 million in 2022 lobbying spend, similarly received DOE SPR award contracts, with subsidiary MPLX LP operating terminals near SPR distribution points. Shell USA ($6.7 million lobbying) and BP America ($5.2 million lobbying) also appear in 2022 DOE SPR award notices as crude purchasers.
The fiscal arithmetic of the releases, as reported by the DOE and estimated by the Congressional Budget Office, cuts in an unexpected direction: average sale prices of approximately $96 per barrel in 2022, compared to repurchase prices averaging $72 per barrel in 2023, produced a net positive Treasury position the CBO estimated at $1.2 to $1.4 billion on the volume differential. Congressional Republicans who criticized the releases as strategic imprudence simultaneously cited the $670 million figure for replenishment savings, depending on the argumentative moment. What neither party's public accounting fully addressed was the replenishment lobbying battle: the Independent Petroleum Association of America, reporting $2.1 million in 2023 lobbying spend, filed LD-2 disclosures specifically citing 'SPR replenishment purchase mechanisms' — lobbying for fixed-price forward contracts that would guarantee domestic producers a floor price, a direct subsidy mechanism dressed as energy security policy.
Fluor Corporation, parent of the SPR's primary site operator, spent $1.28 million on lobbying in 2022 per OpenSecrets, with its PAC contributing approximately $280,000 to federal candidates in the 2022 cycle per FEC records. The company's approximately $1.6 billion operations contract — extended multiple times since its 2014 award — covers the physical infrastructure through which every barrel of the 2022 drawdown passed. The specific contract modification history during the 2022 drawdown period is not fully reconcilable through public USASpending.gov records.
What remains hidden is, in several cases, more consequential than what the public record shows. The internal NEC and NSC deliberation documents governing release timing — memos that would reveal whether market price trajectories influenced drawdown scheduling in ways that benefited specific auction participants — have not been made public. A 2023 House Energy Committee oversight request produced only partial DOE responses. The communications between DOE's Office of Petroleum Reserves and lobbying representatives during the 2022–2023 replenishment tender design process, requested by House Oversight Committee Republicans, remain incomplete in public disclosure. A comprehensive GAO audit of SPR decision-making criteria has not been conducted since 2014. The instrument that would most directly answer the outstanding questions is a combination of a full FOIA production of NEC and DOE deliberative communications from November 2021 through December 2023, a GAO audit of SPR auction design and bidder selection, and a reconciled USASpending.gov disclosure of Fluor's contract modifications during the drawdown period. Until those records are produced, the documented money trail connects SPR policy architects, $60-plus million in annual energy sector lobbying, and the same companies that opposed SPR releases as buyers of the crude those releases put on the market.