Oil from US strategic reserve heads for Europe amid global supply crunch

A cargo of crude from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve departed a Texas port bound for Europe, a signal of increasing oil-market disarray as refiners shun Russian supplies and prices surge.

The rare export of strategic U.S. barrels is evidence of the ever-widening search for crude to replace Russian cargoes seven weeks after President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine triggered international revulsion and sanctions. With the global oil benchmark trading above $110 a barrel, traders and refiners also are trying to cope with a cutoff of Libya’s biggest source of crude and little expansion in U.S. output.

A tanker known as the Advantage Spring loaded low-sulfur crude originally pumped from the strategic reserve caverns in Southwest Louisiana at a port in Nederland, Texas earlier this month, according to a person familiar with the matter. The ship, chartered by an affiliate of French energy giant TotalEnergies SE, is bound for the key European port of Rotterdam, according to ship-tracking data compiled by Bloomberg.

President Joe Biden, along with several allies, recently offered a portion of their strategic reserves for sale to help alleviate some of the supply pinch associated with the escalating war in Ukraine. TotalEnergies didn’t respond to a request for comment.