Gas prices are still high, diesel is at a record high, and the reserve has shrunk more than 30% in six months. While the reserve held around 415 million barrels of oil in February, it now holds less than 285 million barrels of oil — lower than it has been since the early 1980s.
These rapid drawdowns of oil threaten the salt caverns’ structure, says Samantha Gross, director of the energy security and climate initiative at the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan policy think tank. As the reserves get lower and lower, the physical facilities can get degraded, Gross says: " You can damage them by pumping too much out of them."
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This is Biden and Obama’s fault somehow!
MORE MORE MORE
Let’s collapse the oil energy system, so we can finally all be forced to transition to a cheaper, efficient, cleaner, and self-contained energy system like with solar.
Thanks Donny for helping the renewable energy movement!
yeah he pretty much does not care about prices after the election so they are pumping out as much as possible to keep prices from skyrocketing.
“I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody" - Epstein Files star
I wonder why markets are betting against a new shortage tho.
So I watch broadcast tv and there are so many buy gold commercials which makes me wonder what they have up their sleeve for that.
Exactly as I said at the beginning of the summer: they will burn the reserves until the election them immediately turn them off.
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=WCSSTUS1&f=W
We’re still a month out and we mostly stopped pulling from the reserve 3 weeks ago. The last 3 weeks the reserve dropped by less than 1 million barrels, while all summer I think we were averaging more than 5 per week.
what a stupid design that can’t pump out emergency fluid like it was supposed to do. “has to provide emergency fluid slowly or it fails” lol wow
way to go team.
Its unavoidable by economics and geology.
The oil is stored in impermeable salt caves down in Louisiana and Texas. The hard rock salt and oil do not mix so they act as an environmentally stable storage tank that requires no maintenance and doesn’t leech into the ground. This is vastly cheaper and much much safer for very long term storage of oil.
Problem being the caverns “settle” and are partially supported by the pressure of crude oil within them. As the crude is drawn out of them the salt walls could be damaged if pressure is relieved too quickly and/or not replaced with some other support.
Additionally the pumping infrastructure for crude requires the head pressure of a full tank to hit high flows, and some caverns are emptied first. As caverns empty out there is less head pressure, and requires more pump energy to get it out of a deeper hole. Plus fully emptied caverns will not provide addition inlets for higher flow. This is primarily what drives the “limit of economical recovery” they talk about where flows begin to drop off as the reserve is emptied.
The salt caverns are a consumable storage medium. You pump in water to remove the oil, which damages the salt caverns.
The more you pump oil in and out, the more the salt caverns degrade.
I think it’s more about the structural challenges of suddenly having that much volume pumped out of the reserves. Like at such a high rate. But I don’t know much of anything about geostability!
