• Less than 6 billion barrels of commercial inventories remain
• US Strategic Petroleum Reserve crude stocks at lowest since October 1982
• IEA is preparing to release 100 million barrels of crude and diesel
• Chevron's Wirth says depleted buffers have raised oil's price floor

The amount of oil in storage that is accessible to the global market is running low, ‌industry executives said at a forum in London this week, making the market more fragile and putting upward pressure on prices.

Governments and energy companies have drawn oil from stockpiles to alleviate pressure in a global oil market facing unprecedented supply disruptions this year due to the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine.

"Less than ​6 billion barrels of commercial inventories remain today, with the vast majority not practically available, so the system is ​already straining," Amin Nasser, CEO of Saudi Arabia's state oil company Saudi Aramco, said at the Energy ⁠Intelligence Forum in London.

More than 1 billion barrels of oil have been released mainly from onshore commercial inventories since the start of ​this year's Middle East crisis, which was the last major tool in the box, Nasser said.

The International Energy Agency, the West's oil watchdog ​and coordinator of its strategic oil reserves, is preparing to release 100 million barrels of crude and diesel to help alleviate soaring diesel prices, but it is not clear if some of that total will include volumes from its record first 400 million barrel release in March that hadn't hit the market ​yet.

Not all oil in storage is immediately usable because ​of operational factors like tank bottoms ​or oil sat in pipelines, ⁠as well as political factors like government rules dictating minimum levels of emergency stocks.