I disagree that there is no cost associated with making another. Externalising environmental and rectification cost should not be the default approach.

I don't know, the article mentions having to deal with brine. Let it evaporate in a pool and you've got plenty.

Usual problem, people don't understand what they do so they undervalue what they do or think it is "simple" - almost nothing involving millions of people and their interests is ever "simple".

I get somewhat annoyed when people blanket attack Whitehall (the UK Civil Service) universally i.e. the bureaucracy, yes they have problems but you don't run a country with 70 million people without some bureaucracy and ripping apart a system that has worked for centuries means throwing out a lot of good with the "bad".

Wow that is very very cool. Thank you very much for digging that up & sharing the link! Sometimes visuals like that really help me process information.

Crude oil is sketchy stuff. All sorts of VOCs, etc evaporate from it. Some valuable, some, flammable, some will merely kill you. Keeping it confined makes all that more manageable.

TFA lays it all out, oil out in the open is exposed to attack/lightning strikes/etc.

Are you advocating for long term crude oil storage in open air oil lakes?

If the sides of the pond collapse (which happens a lot with mine tailings), then you have something resembling a oil pipeline rupture (which also happens a lot, but some states make it illegal to get video footage of it) which is a rather toxic situation needing soil to be bulldozed and either buried or burned.

Sun, rain, hurricanes, wind, debris is not friendly to long term oil storage.

They’re oil tanks. The ponds are open air ponds.

They look like above ground pits. Empties are showing the white paint and ones with brine look dark.

Thank you for this, that would explain why difference field are talking different numbers.

Huh? The oil price shock in 2022 and resulting SPR drawdown had nothing to do with oil leases. Prices almost doubled worldwide in the span of a week after Russia invaded Ukraine. Look at any chart of petroleum products and it's clearly visible as a huge, almost vertical line.

The explicit purpose of the SPR is to function as a lever to smooth temporary supply shocks. The US increasing oil output by a few percent in either direction wouldn't have made any difference to global disruption of oil markets from a major exporter to Europe starting a war and then getting sanctioned.

The design characteristics require the storage caves to support 5 drawdown cycles using "raw water" - actual phrasing in official documentation.

Also, the SPR is a complex system made up of several locations where salt massifs have been drilled and hollowed out in the shape of highly specified storage caves.

There are requirements for pumping throughput for example, and some of the concerns regarding operational life and the dozens of partial drawdowns these caves have been subjected to, relate to them loosing the ability to quickly discharge oil.

In a word: it's complicated. I encourage looking up technical documentation online, super easy to find using 'filetype:pdf'. There are a lot of details involved in building, running, and assurances required from the SPR storage system.

Depends a lot on how quickly it erodes the salt dome and the costs of using and storing the brine instead of using fresh water. Storing that much brine runs into the same space issues that storing the oil above ground would, slight ameliorated by the brine at least not being flammable.

It doesn't really matter. 45,000 acres for a tank farm, or multiple tank farms, would be basically free by the standards of this project. Yes it's "an area the size of Washington DC" but it wouldn't be in Washington DC, where rent is expensive, it would be on some low-value desert land that the military might otherwise use as an artillery range.

Storing it in underground salt caverns is more secure, not necessarily cheaper.

Being realistic is the opposite of being off.

As the article points out fire is a real concern here, which is one of many reasons making salt caverns so appealing. But it’s also a major driver for distance between each above ground tank, you want to isolate risks so a single failure doesn’t propagate across the facility.

Just looking at the tanks ignores the support and access areas around the tanks. Yes they wouldn't scale exactly linearly together but taking an existing farm and multiplying it up to get the capacity is better than just looking at the raw area taken up by the tanks. There's all sorts of pumping and piping that goes into these farms you'd have to route into the above ground mega tank farm version of the SPR.

We're decades away from the point we could have even possibly built 100 miles squared of solar farm much less the batteries to store it and replacing all the uses of fossil fuel that aren't just electrical generators. Even if we snapped our fingers and magically replaced every extant car, plane, truck and train with an electric equivalent and had all the infrastructure there's still industrial uses of petroleum that would drive a desire for strategic reserves of the stuff.

Diesel has limited shelf life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbial_contamination_of_die...

  Fuel companies state that untreated fuel will remain usable for only one year, after which fuel contamination ("the diesel bug") begins to appear

Yes but the risks associated with storing brine are far less than oil. Brine leaks out? It might kill the flora nearby but rain will eventually wash it away. Someone blows up the brine tank? Divert some freshwater until you can rebuild.

But in reality, storing all of that brine would be a massive undertaking on its own. The largest salt cavern is 37M barrels which equates to a circular pond that's 600m across and 20m deep. That's huge. And of course you don't want the brine seeping into the ground water so it needs a good liner. But I suppose you really don't need a pond that big, how often are we completely draining the cavern anyway? We're at half capacity right now and that's the lowest it's been in 50 years. Normally it's been much much higher. So you really don't need all that brine, just enough for the normal ebb and flow of the reserves, maybe like 10%. In the event the reserves get drained, divert some freshwater to compensate.

You don't need tanks to store the brine, just a huge pit/pool. If you look at satellite imagery, that giant pit with brine in it is exactly what they have next to the storage facilities.

> as well store the oil in those tanks

Salt does not burn, unlike oil. It would be sufficient to store dry salt, and prepare the brine during the pumping. Still a lot of hassle, of course.

Just spitballing here, can't you just store the salt alone and make the hyper-saturated salt water on the fly? That seems reasonable.

You could store the salt. You go up far beyond saturation. Salt sediments on the floor (which also might seal it). When you need brine you pump in seawater into a tunnelsystem in the sediment. The saturated brine should be lighter and further up. Overflow to second basin, where it's pumped into the cavern. Thus size comes down to whatever size is needed to store enough salt and or, be big enough to guarantee a certain rate of volume of fully saturated water per time; so basically dimensions that guarantee a phase separation and high enough diffusion rate. And some bad ass pumps (or have the basin be below sealevel and a dam with gates; probably the pumps for reasons of security>efficency in that case)

Amazing -- appreciate the explanation.

Agreed, considering that sor.say future wars will be around (drinking) water it seems reasonable to at least link some cost to the brine or the water required.