You're 100% correct, it was not. People seem to be very willy-nilly about it. You never want to dip into it to ease the price at the pump. It's for very targeted strategic war-time use.

Things I think people do not understand about the SPR:

1. It's not barrels of oil ready to go. It's multiple huge caverns that were made by dissolving the salt found there with water, hollowing out the space to make the cavern.
2. We then pumped oil, free flowing crude, into these caverns. When we need oil, we pump it out and put it in barrels
3. Because of this, drawing too much out can literally cause the cavern to collapse and need to be re-drilled/repaired, etc. We are months and months from that, but trending that way.

Someone made a great graph last month based on DoE reports:

When does the SPR run dry

TL;DR - At current drawdown levels the theoretical, everything goes great pulling it back out, is Feb 2027. We'll see how much we drawdown in June and the rest of this summer.

It's a bad market feedback loop IMO.