Comment by kulahan
10 hours ago
I’m certain engineers have considered this, but it doesn’t seem answered anywhere: why not just pump the original brine back in to move around the oil? Wouldn’t that at least prevent eroding the storage unit and causing it to fail?
Unrelated: dang, he wasn’t underselling this being a pretty elegant solution! I never would’ve thought of it, for sure.
Wouldn't you then need to solve the similar problem of where to store the brine in the meantime?
Yeah, but that’s probably easier to solve than eventually losing the whole dang structure!
Yes, that's what they do. The brine is stored in huge pools next to the extraction site.