By Andrea Hargraves 
The 31 member countries of the International Energy Agency, which met today, reached an agreement to release crude oil from their emergency reserves, in response to the turmoil in the oil market resulting from the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.
The agreement was reached at an extraordinary meeting of the International Energy Agency’s Board of Governors, chaired by US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm.
Details of this new release of oil from emergency reserves will be released next week.
Portugal, which is part of the 31 member states of the International Energy Agency, will also use its own emergency reserves.
The remaining countries are Germany, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, South Korea, Denmark, the United States, Slovakia, Spain, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway and the Netherlands Poland, United Kingdom, Czech Republic, Sweden, Switzerland and Turkey.
This agreement follows an earlier action by members of the International Energy Agency, announced last month, in which they committed to remove 62.7 million barrels from their stockpile.
IEA members have contingency stocks of 1.5 billion barrels.
With today’s agreement, this will be the fifth time the agency has released emergency reserves. Previous class actions were resolved in 1991, 2005, 2011 and March 1, 2022.
The IEA ministers reiterated their concern about the impact of Russia’s “serious military actions” on energy security, and expressed their support for the sanctions imposed by the international community in response to this aggression.
They also expressed their solidarity with the people of Ukraine and their democratically elected government in the face of the “shocking and unjustified violation of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine”.
The Agency’s Board of Governors also encouraged member states to support Ukraine through the supply of petroleum products.
Yesterday, US President Joe Biden announced that the United States will once again exploit its strategic oil reserves and release one million barrels per day for six months, in a new attempt to contain the rise in oil prices. black gold “.
Fuel prices have also come under strong pressure on the other side of the Atlantic, with a material impact on inflation, and this recourse to strategic reserves will provide some relief – the US consumes about 20 million barrels per day, which is a fifth of oil reserves. global demand.
Thus, the United States will release a total of 180 million barrels in six months.
The International Energy Agency, established in 1974 in response to the 1973 oil shock, aims to help coordinate collective responses to major disruptions to crude supplies.
So far, there have been several cases of emergency release of strategic reserves, in coordination with the International Energy Agency – coordinated action between the US and five other countries (China, India, Japan, South Korea and the UK) last November was not one of them. Its main goal was to stem the price hike, which usually does not include the efforts of the International Energy Agency.
Before the coordinated action last month that was announced today, there were three more major steps in the same direction.
The first was in 1991, when 17.3 million barrels of US crude were used to reduce market turmoil during the Gulf War, after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.
The second occurred in 2005, when 60 million barrels, 20.8 million of them from the United States, were released due to supply disruptions due to Hurricane Katrina.
In 2011, 60 million barrels were withdrawn again, 30 million of which belonged to the United States – the motives were related to reduced supplies due to unrest in Libya and other countries.
(The news was last updated at 17:56)