Liam Denning, Columnist

Trump Would Like You To Buy Some Virtual Oil

His reported Strategic Petroleum Reserve scheme is a plan to funnel money to frackers, with a veneer of energy security.

April 16, 2020 at 1:30 PM UTC

By Liam Denning

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

President Donald Trump wants to buy some options that will probably never be called.
Photographer: Bloomberg/Bloomberg

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What is a Strategic Petroleum Reserve? It’s maybe the sort of thing you thought you knew. Perhaps you picture vast, dank pools of oil stashed in caverns located in specially selected locations — strategic, as it were — in the U.S. And for 635 million barrels of the stuff, you’ve pretty much nailed it.

But you really need to embrace the abstract; go bigger and more lateral, like you’re micro-dosing your way through a McKinsey interview. Because on some level, an SPR is really just, like, a number.