“The U.S. Strategic Oil Reserve is a series of vast, subterranean salt caverns in four different sites in Louisiana and Texas. Many are enormous – the average cavern holds about 10mn barrels […] This network of tunnels, grottos, pumps and wells can in total hold about 715mn barrels of oil, or enough to supply the entire U.S. with all the oil it needs for over a month” – but those salt caverns were only designed to be drained and refilled five times.
The Financial Times calculates that we are already at the cavern’s ninth historic drawdown, suggesting that “catastrophic structural damage,” including dissolution of the salt caverns, is now a viable risk. This could mean, among other things, that the reserves can no longer be drained in their entirety, as “a minimum level of oil… must be kept in the salt caverns” to avoid this fate, with the result that the reserves’ effectiveness in a time of future national emergency will be reduced.
Of course, this could also mean that someday the caverns will simply collapse.
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