In response to a congressional request, GAO presented its quarterly review of the Department of Energy's (DOE) progress in developing, operating, and filling the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR).

GAO found that: (1) as of June 30, 1987, the SPR inventory totalled 527.2 million barrels of oil; (2) DOE added 7.2 million barrels of crude oil to SPR at an average fill rate of 79,000 barrels per day; (3) DOE plans to purchase 6.6 million barrels of oil from the Mexican national oil company with the $190 million left in the SPR account; (4) inspections and tests for pipeline deterioration identified problems at some storage sites; (5) DOE conducted reliability, availability, and maintainability tests on the Weeks Island site equipment and recommended engineering analyses to solve its operational problems; and (6) DOE placed the entire SPR organization in an immediate drawdown alert status in order to participate in a drawdown readiness exercise.