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After deliberating and assessing the global oil market situation in the face of Middle Eastern conflicts stemming from the United States’ attack on Iran, a cohort of 32 different developed nations agreed to make an “unprecedented” move to help address “oil market challenges.”
The International Energy Agency (IEA) held an emergency meeting at its Paris headquarters Tuesday, with energy representatives from the cohort of G7 countries, to “assess market conditions,” which IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol says “have been significantly affected by the conflict in the Middle East.”
Following that meeting on Thursday, the 32 member countries of the IEA unanimously agreed to collectively release the largest quantity of emergency oil reserves they ever have as a coalition, amounting to 400 million barrels.
“The oil market challenges we are facing are unprecedented in scale, therefore, I am very glad that IEA Member countries have responded with an emergency collective action of unprecedented size,” Birol said following the announcement about the release of the emergency oil reserves. “Oil markets are global, so the response to major disruptions needs to be global too.”
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International Energy Agency (IEA) Executive Director Fatih Birol in Paris on March 10, 2026. (Photo by Ludovic MARIN / AFP via Getty Images)
President Donald Trump touted the IEA agreement during remarks in Kentucky Wednesday afternoon, saying the move “will substantially reduce oil prices.”
Before the outbreak of war with Iran, oil was trading in the range of $60 to $70 a barrel, but prices soared after the conflict began, with crude oil futures reaching upward of $115 a barrel on Monday – the highest level since 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine. However, some experts suggest that the market is correcting itself already from an initial scare that the conflict in the Middle East would have a major impact on oil prices.
“The market realized that maybe things aren’t that bad – the U.S. is having incredible military victories, President Trump is saying, ‘Hey, you know what, the war is probably not going to be going on that long.’ And even some signals that the world doesn’t have to just sit and stand and take it,” said Phil Flynn, senior market analyst at the Price Futures Group and a FOX Business contributor.
The members of the IEA hold emergency stockpiles of over 1.2 billion barrels, and a further 600 million barrels of oil industry stocks. This coordinated release of an unprecedented amount of oil will be the sixth in its roughly half-century history. Previous collective action was taken in 1991, 2005, 2011 and twice in 2022.
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The previous record for the largest collective action was the latest release of emergency oil stocks following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.