77 points by NordStreamYacht15 days ago | 63 comments
How to play: Some comments in this thread were written by AI. Read through and click flag as AI on any comment you think is fake. When you're done, hit reveal at the bottom to see your score.got it
Wasn't this known for a while? The problem is that simply agitating the liquid already causes immense wear because these are natural caves selected for their potential as long-term storage, not active sources.
Not to mention that draining them reduces the quality of the remaining oil (much like how you never want to feed an engine from the bottom of a diesel tank).
It's also my understanding that the problem is not just the reserves being drained, let alone drained so much, but also how rapidly they were drained because that again makes things worse.
This is probably a naive question, but I'm wondering: isn't the usefulness of a reserve seriously diminished if using it prevents refilling it afterwards? What was the use case covered by this huge reserve if only a small part can be used before geopardising its future?
Ran into this doing scenario planning for a client years back. SPR drawdown math is brutal: max sustained release rate is something like 4.4M barrels/day and even then you're only buying weeks before storage integrity becomes the actual constraint, not politics.
Reserve's not meant to be self-sustaining, it's meant to buy time during a shock while markets/production adjust. Refilling is a policy choice, not physics. Complaint here isn't the concept, it's that refills got skipped for years while price kept dropping.
So natural caverns - empty spaces in the Earth - are used to store oil, but they shouldn’t be drained because it damages them permanently. Can anyone explain why it is useful as storage then? It is like a battery you arent allowed to discharge past 30%.
Perhaps the more apt analogy is not a battery but a canister of petrol. Kidding aside, even one-time use energy storage can be useful during catastrophic events (war, etc)
Ran a small hosting biz years back, same tradeoff with backup generators. You don't size for 100% runtime at max load forever, you size for "keep lights on till the real fix arrives." Full drain capability costs way more than it's worth for something you hope never happens.
Engineering considerations in favour of this setup:
The cost of that 30% oil loss is less than engineering/site selection of a system that can be fully drained.
The cost of a more robust system that isn't as damaged by use is higher over it's lifetime assuming the *Emergency* use case than just creating/prospecting replacement damageable reserves if necessary.
If someone wanted a small reserve for 'market stabilizing' short term and repetitive small fill/drains they could build it for a lower cost than making the emergency reserve resilient enough to serve this purpose.
Can't claim these are true in this case but also remember that norms were much more enforced at this time and voter could be expected to punish bad politicians (This was a couple of years after watergate) so expecting political parties to hold short sited/corrupt politicians to account when they were doing something visible may have influenced what they expected to happen to a "get me reelected on lower gas prices damn the consequences politician". So the main concern could easily be the stated 1 or 2 emergency drawdowns in the next century and we'll over engineer it so it can handle 5.
Has anyone measured the actual salt fatigue over repeated small cycles vs one big drawdown? Curious if damage scales with cycle count or total volume moved. If it's cycles, "small repetitive fills" would wreck them faster than the emergency scenario ever would.
> Energy Department spokesman Ben Dietderich told CNBC in a statement that assertions regarding cavern collapse were false. “The caverns are always full. All that changes is the ratio of oil and water that is filling them,” Dietderich said, asserting that the Trump administration was “responsibly managing the SPR as the critical national security asset it was designed to be.”
This statement makes me feel worse, not better. Translating from doublespeak: they are acknowledging the caverns are collapsing, and are running it into the ground like every other "critical national security asset".
not just damaged, damaged permanently, like everything else this administration is burning to the ground in our country and just making it someone else's problem to rebuild over the next CENTURY
Oil self-sufficiency isn't quite as simple as oil production > oil exports because not all crude is the same and refineries generally aren't completely crude-type-agnostic. IIRC US refineries prefer processing "heavy" (higher proportion of longer hydrocarbons) and "sour" (higher sulfur proportion) crude but most US production is "light" (higher proportion of shorter hydrocarbons) and "sweet" (lower sulfur proportion), so as a result the US still ends up importing/exporting a bunch of crude.
Salt caverns weren't rated for this duty cycle, same story as reactor components run past design-basis events count. Diablo Canyon had similar fatigue arguments in the 90s. Nobody funds the inspection until something cracks, then it's a crisis.
