Iran war leads IEA to agree largest oil reserve release

• 400 million barrels made available
• Challenge ‘unprecedented in scale’
• Sixth release in 52-year history

The International Energy Agency agreed to its largest release of emergency oil reserves on Wednesday, in response to the shipping disruptions and soaring energy prices that followed the US-Israeli attack on Iran.

In a statement on Wednesday, the IEA said its 32 member countries unanimously agreed to make available 400 million barrels of oil after meeting the previous day.
The IEA’s executive director Fatih Birol called the challenges facing oil markets “unprecedented in scale”, requiring the organisation to take action.
“Oil markets are global so the response to major disruptions needs to be global too,” he said.
The release will be equivalent to 20 days of average oil flow through the Strait of Hormuz. 

Iranian forces have effectively shut down the chokepoint and have begun attacking commercial shipping in the region. The IEA estimates that one-quarter of global seaborne oil trade passes through the strait.

Its closure, and fears of a prolonged conflict, led to the price of Brent crude nearing $120 on Monday. Prices have subsequently dropped back to around $90 on talk of the release of strategic reserves and indications that the US may curtail the conflict or forcibly reopen the strait.

The release is only the sixth in the IEA’s 52-year history and represents a third of the combined emergency stockpiles held by its members – 1.2 billion barrels. 

It is more than three times the size of the second-largest IEA release, when 120 million barrels were made available to markets in 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The US accounted for half of the contributions.
The IEA did not indicate how the contributions would be divided among member states for this upcoming release, saying only that oil would be made available to the market “over a timeframe that is appropriate to the national circumstances of each member country”.
The US currently has around 415 million barrels of oil in its strategic reserves, less than 60 percent of the volumes it had at the beginning of 2022.
US President Donald Trump had criticised his predecessor Joe Biden for allowing oil reserves to be drawn down following the Russian invasion. In January 2025, he said in his inaugural speech that he would refill them “right to the top”.