The US Department of Energy announced the conclusion of a contract to purchase 4.65 million barrels of crude oil to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which witnessed large withdrawals over the past year.

ExxonMobil and Macquarie Commodities Trading will provide this amount of oil at an average price of about $76.92 per barrel for delivery to the Bayou Choctaw site in Louisiana during the last three months of the year.

This announcement follows a previous decision to withdraw large amounts of petroleum reserves to confront the rise in gasoline prices resulting from the war in Ukraine, which led to the reserves falling to their lowest level in forty years.

The United States is currently seeking to gradually rebuild this reserve through successive purchases as part of its effort to achieve a balance between the goals of energy security and controlling energy prices.