OilPrice.com By Charles Kennedy
The members of the International Energy Agency are ready to release more oil from their strategic emergency reserves to tame the surging oil prices, the IEAâs Executive Director Fatih Birol told the Financial Times on Tuesday.
âWe are ready to [release] as much oil as is needed,â Birol told FT.
Last week, the IEA agreed that some of its members would release 60 million barrels of crude oil from various countriesâ strategic petroleum reserves. The United States has agreed to release 30 million barrels of crude oil from its SPR. The rest of the IEA members in Europe and Asia will release the remaining 30 million barrels.
Last weekâs announcement of the oil release failed to stop rallying oil prices as the market feared a disruption in Russian oil supply. Meanwhile, traders and buyers in Europe shunned Russiaâs crude, eyeing a potential ban on imports of energy commodities from Russia, and Russia is threatening to shut the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline to Germany.
The release of 60 million barrels of oil is just 4 percent of the total strategic reserves of the members of the IEA, Birol told FT today…
