Comment by nostrademons
12 hours ago
There was a good comment on r/oil by someone who worked on the engineering for the SPR. Unfortunately it's fallen off the front page and I can't find it now, but:
> Also, the more water we pump in, the more salt leeches into the water and the more the bottom of the chamber deforms, creating shear forces in the upp walls that lower its overall structural integrity.
It turns out that it's trivially easy to prevent the water from leeching out the salt. They presaturate the water with salt, so that it already contains the maximum amount of salt that can be dissolved for a given temperature. When they pump the brine out, it goes into aboveground brine pools that can easily be seen on satellite imagery. The salinity of this brine can easily be controlled: if you want to expand the cavern, you mix it with freshwater so the brine dissolves more of the edges, if you don't you pump it back in as brine.
Edit: Here, found some satellite imagery of one of the SPR sites:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/B8XJ9TVhQfcdErky5
You can clearly see the brine pond, which is as big as the aboveground portion of the SPR itself.
I was unaware of this; that's important information and I'll keep it in mind going forward.
> the brine pond.
Then why not store the oil there directly instead of going all the trouble of pumping it in and out of the caverns? Is it so it doesn't rain on it?
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.
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.
Are you advocating for long term crude oil storage in open air oil lakes?
TFA lays it all out, oil out in the open is exposed to attack/lightning strikes/etc.
Huh, of course. Like in salt farming, after harvesting the salt they wash it with saturated brine so it doesn’t just dissolve again.
Are the round things brine ponds? They look like floating roof tanks
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.
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