Amid the ongoing and deeply unpopular U.S. war against Iran, the Trump administration has drained the nation's supply of crude oil reserves to its lowest levels in more than 40 years, and a bleak prediction by the financial data company Barchart has onlookers panicking.

Sharing data from a Bank of America research chart on Monday, Barchart predicted that the United States has “just 41 days of crude oil inventory left” after the Trump administration had drained the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to its “lowest level in half a century.” Established in the mid-1970s after the 1973–74 Arab oil embargo caused fuel shortages and price shocks across the United States, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is the government's emergency crude stockpile, held in underground salt caverns at four sites along the Gulf Coast of Texas and Louisiana. It previously held around 726 million barrels of crude oil in 2010 — as of Monday, according to Reuters, only 289.7 million barrels remain.

The reserve is separate from the commercial inventories held by refiners and oil companies, and past presidents have ordered releases during supply shocks, including the 1991 Gulf War, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the roughly 180-million-barrel sale in 2022 following Russia's invasion of Ukraine — the largest release in the SPR's history. The International Energy Agency, of which the United States is a member, asks member governments to hold emergency oil stocks covering at least 90 days of net imports, a long-standing preparedness benchmark. Reserve levels are published weekly by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, making the pace of the drawdown publicly trackable.

“This seems bad,” wrote Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) in a social media post on X.

Oil prices have surged amid the U.S. war against Iran and Tehran's disruptions to the Strait of Hormuz, a critical shipping waterway through which 20% of the world's oil trade historically flowed. While oil shipments through the strait have increased in recent weeks, they remain far below pre-war levels.

Prominent technology reviewer and inventor Zack Nelson warned that “the [Band-Aid] holding everything together is about to break,” and Christopher David, a Navy veteran and prominent Black-rights advocate, told his more than 70,000 followers on X to prepare themselves for imminent disaster.

“Buckle. The. F---. Up,” David wrote. “September 2nd are tank bottoms for the SPR.”

Decoding Fox News, a media-monitoring project created and operated by journalist Juliet Jeske, argued that the draining of the SPR would likely pose a serious political problem for President Donald Trump just months ahead of the midterms, when all 435 House seats and roughly a third of the Senate are on the ballot in November. “Trump cannot bluff his way out of this,” reads an online post on X from Decoding Fox News. “The man bankrupted casinos. That takes a special kind of stupid.”

Trump cannot bluff his way out of this. The man bankrupted casinos. That takes a special kind of stupid. — Decoding Fox News (@DecodingFoxNews) August 24, 2026