The damn thing will probably collapse before they're done.
Maybe instead of a ballroom next to the White House they can build some new tanks instead.
SPR depletion raises questions about integrity of caverns that store oil
... The Government Accountability Office said in a May report that
“repeated partial drawdowns followed by refill can leach a single part
of a cavern repeatedly, leading to undesirable shapes.”
The majority of the SPR’s caverns were found to be in “very good condition” after the 2022 drawdown, according to the GAO.
“However,
every drawdown cycle expands cavern volume and reduces the spacing
between caverns within the salt dome, which ultimately reduces their
long-term viability,” it said.
To release oil from the SPR, water is pumped into the bottom of the
caverns to displace the crude to the surface and pump it through wells
into pipelines.
Seventy million barrels is the strict physical
minimum needed at the top of the caverns to keep the extraction pipes
safely submerged in oil rather than water, said Siddharth Misra, a
petroleum engineering professor at Texas A&M University.
But
“the practical operational floor for the crude inventory is between 250
million and 300 million barrels,” Misra said in an email to CNBC. At
current inventory levels, “cavern integrity and overall operational
capability are at an elevated risk,” he said.
When the inventory drops below 300 million barrels, the SPR loses its
ability to pump oil at rapid speeds to address emergencies, Misra said.
The system’s pipes and pumps could also get damaged as the oil layer
thins at the top and sludge rises toward the extraction intake at the
cavern ceiling, he said.
Fresh water is often pumped into the
caverns during rapid drawdowns which dissolves the salt walls, Misra
said. This “creates flatter, less stable roof and severely thins the
critical salt pillars that separate adjacent caverns, greatly increasing
the geological risk of a structural cave-in,” he said.
The SPR
was originally designed for five full drawdowns. Instead, it has
executed dozens of large and small releases over the past 40 years,
Misra said.
“Because the system was not designed for this many
cycles, the repeated injection of water and extraction of oil have
caused severe cavern deformation, accelerated the rate of massive salt
falls from the ceilings, and significantly weakened the overall
structural integrity of the aging reserve,” he said.
Energy
Department officials told the GAO that they are “holding the SPR
infrastructure together with ‘Band-Aids,’ and that it is uncertain how
long they will hold.” More than a quarter of the SPR inventory was “not
available for drawdown due to a combination of construction outages and
cavern outages” as of December 2025, the GAO found. ...
