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Aging caverns imperil Trump push to refill petroleum reserve
Maintenance problems affecting the Strategic Petroleum Reserve are in the spotlight after oil releases under former President Joe Biden.
www.eenews.net
Energy Secretary Chris Wright told the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy this week that SPR drawdowns under former President Joe Biden resulted in structural damage to facilities. More than $100 million of repairs are needed to bring the storage facilities back to full capacity, Wright said. And nearly filling it back up could cost billions of dollars.
“The immediate thing we need to do is finish the repairs on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It was drawn down so quickly, and that causes some damage to the infrastructure itself,” Wright said in testimony.
Siddharth Misra, an associate professor of petroleum engineering and geophysics at Texas A&M University, said in an email that withdrawing large quantities of oil from salt caverns — like those that constitute the SPR — can cause storage sites to shrink, or compact.
He said to imagine underground oil storage as giant, oil-soaked sponges. When large amounts of oil are rapidly pulled out, he said that is like squeezing the sponge dry due to stress from rocks above the storage site. A quick removal of fluid causes pressure within the reservoir wall to drop significantly and causes stress on the rock to increase as the rock above it bears down, he said.
“This compaction of the pore spaces can lead to a permanent loss of storage capacity, making it much harder to extract remaining oil and potentially causing the rock to crack under the immense pressure of the overlying layers,” Misra wrote in response to questions from E&E News. “In simpler terms, the site might not be able to hold as much oil anymore, and future extraction becomes a more difficult and less efficient process.”
The pressure on the surrounding rock when fluid is removed can also cause the barriers of the salt cavern to begin to slowly deform and squeeze inward “like a very thick, gooey Play-Doh or taffy that’s slowly moving,” Misra said.
That can put tremendous pressure on steel pipes, known as casings, that run into the cavern and carry fluids up and down into the storage site. Those pipes can get bent, be crushed or break completely by the inward push of the salt in the salt domes.
“This not only makes it harder to get oil or gas out but can also lead to dangerous failures, reducing the cavern’s lifespan and safety,” Misra wrote.
The first thing in the dem playbook for high gas prices is raiding the strategic reserves even though it never lowers prices much and is temporary. Anyone with an 80+ IQ knows this, but they do it every-single-time.
From AI:
The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) stood at about 638 million barrels when President Biden took office in January 2021. By the end of his term on December 31, 2024, it was 393.6 million barrels (per U.S. Department of Energy data). This reflects a net drawdown of roughly 244 million barrels during his presidency.
