New Contracts Awarded for Continued Oil Fill of Strategic Petroleum Reserve

New Awards Support President's Direction to Fill the Reserve, Advance Energy Security

New Orleans, LA - The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded five new contracts to deliver crude oil to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve this spring under the Royalty-In-Kind (RIK) exchange program.

Atlantic Trading and Marketing, Inc; ExxonMobil Oil Corporation; Glencore, Ltd; Koch Supply and Trading, LP; and Shell Trading (US) Company, submitted the best offers and were awarded six month contracts to begin delivering approximately 104,000 barrels per day of crude oil to the reserve, beginning this April.

As with all recent oil delivery contracts to the SPR, the crude oil will come from exchange arrangements the companies make for "Royalty-in-Kind" crude produced from federal offshore leases in the Gulf of Mexico and owed to the U.S. government. The Energy Department awarded contracts to companies offering the highest exchange value of specification-grade oil for the Reserve.

Under the RIK program, Federal Outer Continental Shelf tracts are leased to crude oil producers who deliver royalty oil from designated Gulf of Mexico production platforms to market centers along the Gulf Coast. The companies will receive crude from the market centers and deliver "in-kind" oil to the SPR. Actual volumes delivered to the SPR take into account adjustments for transportation and quality differentials.

The RIK program is managed by the Department of Interior Minerals Management Service and represents a practical means of filling the reserve in keeping with the President's objective to do so in a deliberate and cost effective manner.

Approximately 643 million barrels of oil are currently stored in the SPR's underground salt caverns located along the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Texas. The SPR is estimated to reach 700 million barrels in inventory, which is its current storage capacity, during 2005.

For more information, contact: News Media:  Drew Malcomb,  DOE Office of Public Affairs, 202-586-5806