PSX - Marathon Valero lead buyers in latest Strategic Petroleum Reserve sale

The Department of Energy said Thursday that nine companies will buy 20M barrels of oil in the latest sale from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve , part of the Biden administration's release of 1M bbl/day of crude oil for six months.

The companies buying oil Thursday included Marathon Petroleum ( NYSE: MPC ), with 5.6M barrels; Valero Energy ( NYSE: VLO ), 4.9M barrels; Shell ( SHEL ), 4.25M barrels; Equinor ( EQNR ), 1.05M barrels; Phillips 66 ( PSX ), 950K barrels; and Chevron ( CVX ), 350K barrels.

U.S. gasoline prices have fallen from more than $5/gal earlier this summer to below $4/gal, which Deputy U.S. Energy Secretary David Turk said is partly due to the SPR sale and coordinated withdrawals from other countries' oil reserves.

The withdrawals have reduced SPR's supply to 464.6M barrels, the lowest level since 1985; Turk said the DoE will use money from current sales to buy oil at lower prices.

Marathon Petroleum ( MPC ) reported strong Q2 earnings highlighted by a surge in refining profitability, but "the recent pullback in oil and gas prices suggests a softer earnings environment into the second half of the year," BOOX Research writes in an analysis published recently on Seeking Alpha .

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