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What is the Strategic Petroleum Reserve?
- JohnJamesRambo 7y agoImagine if we hid some damn masks next time. We have to broaden our minds about what things threaten national security.
- rvnx 7y agoThey'll probably be damp and wet after a few months
- gruez 7y agoSurely they can seal the masks with plastic?
- echelon 7y agoMasks break down over time, so they're not something we can safely stockpile. They have a relatively short shelf life.
- InTheArena 7y agoA lot have expired, but 3M has also recently said that they may stil be used. The expired ones are going to police departments.
- SteveNuts 7y agoWhy couldn't they rotate out the supply?
- Glide 7y agoI thought it was the elastic that broke down and not the filter? If so you can basically fix a mask with elastic and a stapler.
- lsllc 7y agoThe elastic does breaks down alarmingly quickly (I wonder if this is intentional) -- I have a box of N95 masks I bought a couple of years ago when doing some drywall work and the elastic has utterly failed. Meanwhile the elastic in my underwear seems to last forever! I guess I know how I can fix those masks ...
- JohnJamesRambo 7y agoI have my doubts about if the mask itself really expires. It sounds like one of those things they stamp an expiration on because they have to. Blown polypropylene will probably outlast the heat death of the universe.
- InTheArena 7y agoWe did have a reserve (and there is some coming out). This virus is using up masks at 4-10x greater then the projected numbers. We also apparently sent a chunk of them to China early on.
- JohnJamesRambo 7y ago>This virus is using up masks at 4-10x greater That tells me we didn't really have reserves, we had an attempt at a reserve.
- mter 7y agoWe have the national strategic stockpile for masks in the US. The problem is that neither party likes funding masks because voters hate it. It's like infrastructure spending. Neither party wants to do it, it doesn't buy enough votes.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- avip 7y agohttps://www.onlyonceblog.com/2020/04/state-of-colorado-covid-19-innovation-response-team-part-iii-gearing-up-days-4-6 https://www.onlyonceblog.com/2020/04/state-of-colorado-covid... >Seems like it’s neither strategic nor a stockpile (The whole sequence makes a concise and well worth read)
- InTheArena 7y agoThanks for link. However, the link is one person in Colorado complaining that the state is not getting enough machines. (There are not enough machines period, even thought he US, per-virus had the largest stockpile in the world). The problem here is not one of having the mechanism, it's underestimating how many would be needed in a massive outbreak.
- avip 7y ago(the link was shared more in hope people would read it and find it interesting - it's obvious no reasonable emergency stock could have been prepared for the situation we're in)
- Spooky23 7y agoWe do. The government is selling them at low prices to the private sector, and states or hospitals are buying at a premium.
- pault 7y agoSource?
- seneca 7y agoI think the more important take away is the damage of globalism to our ability to manufacture things ourselves. Sure, having a stockpile of masks is beneficial, but having the infrastructure and supply chain continually setup to manufacture them would go a lot further. This is especially true of medicine. Instead we have irresponsible politicians letting business chase slave labor, and only invoking "national security" when it comes to deteriorating rights or buying ever more machines of war.
- cowmix 7y agoEven if we made them here in the US, we still need a stockpile. We used to stockpile masks.
- theklub 7y agoAs long as they will last, sounds like some of the stockpiled masks were rotten...
- hn_throwaway_99 7y agoCurious, does anyone know if the US govt is filling the reserve now, or even adding capacity? With oil so incredibly cheap right now, now is the absolute best time to be building and expanding our reserves.
- influx 7y agoSeems so: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/03/13/trump-oil-strategic-reserve/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/03/1...
- chewz 7y agoSure they do https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-13/trump-says-going-to-buy-large-quantities-of-oil-for-reserve-k7qlrbck https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-13/trump-say...
- sambull 7y agoYes, just announced. They will be using the most expensive oil to fill the reserves up, as a way of financially propping up the oil and gas industry. https://www.energy.gov/articles/us-department-energy-make-strategic-petroleum-reserve-storage-capacity-available-struggling https://www.energy.gov/articles/us-department-energy-make-st...
- barney54 7y agoThe most expensive oil? Oil is currently $25 a barrel. What am I missing here?
- sambull 7y agoThe oil is from US producers, when they sell that oil out it won't be for $25/barrel when most of that oil will be from fracked wells costing $50+/dollars a barrel to operate [1]. "The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates that in 2019, about 2.81 billion barrels (or 7.7 million barrels per day) of crude oil were produced directly from tight oil resources in the United States. This was equal to about 63% of total U.S. crude oil production in 2019." [0] [0] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=847&t=6 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=847&t=6 [1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/oil-price-fracking_n_5e669a89c5b6670e72fccde6 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/oil-price-fracking_n_5e669a89...
- GiorgioG 7y agoTo provide some context, the US uses about 20m barrels of oil per day. We have about 35 days worth of oil reserves. It seems if there was some kind of extended emergency where we could not produce oil, 772m barrels would be wholly inadequate.
- claudiawerner 7y agoI'd imagine that in such a situation, a lot of things would be shut down - there's a good chance it'd last a little more than 35 days when use is lower.
- dpbriggs 7y agoAnd North American production will ramp up as quickly as possible. We've seen very expensive oil in the last decade which has made a variety of alternative extraction methods economical. Not entirely sure how a situation could arise where oil production is impossible.
- mdorazio 7y agoExactly. For example, right now we're operating at somewhere around 25% less transit than normal [1] and that's without even specifically targeting reducing oil consumption. In an oil emergency situation we could probably get to 30-40% reduction pretty quickly. [1] https://www.geotab.com/blog/impact-of-covid-19/ https://www.geotab.com/blog/impact-of-covid-19/
- tobylane 7y agoOf that 20m/day normal use, the reserves can only bring up about 4.5m/day, so that’s more like 150 days.
- AlgorithmicTime 7y agoThe US also is capable of producing all the oil it needs domestically, so it's not as though we'd be just drawing on the reserve in case of emergency.
- morelisp 7y ago
- quotemstr 7y agoI hate headlines like this. The oil isn't "hidden": the strategic petroleum reserve is a completely up front and public thing. There's no hiding going on. That word in the headline is just clickbait.
- valuearb 7y agoIt’s also not strategic or necessary.
- kube-system 7y agoThe word 'hidden' has meanings other than 'secret'. It can be correctly used to describe something that is known, but out of view.
- oneplane 7y agoSo what about other emergency reserves? No point in hoarding oil if you are dead.
- taneq 7y agoWell as long as everyone has enough toilet paper the oil should get us through the rest, right?
- Ericson2314 7y agoOil and TP makes a pretty good zatar baklava.
- kube-system 7y agoYes, we should and do have reserves for other things too.
- BubRoss 7y agoThis story is about oil reserves.
- valuearb 7y agoDidn’t turn out to be the best investment, did it?
- exabrial 7y agoI wouldn't call it "hidden", it's public knowledge. It needs to be filled however because oil is so cheap. And for the keyboard nay-sayers that are typing on a keyboard made of ABS, walking their down on a nylon leash, holding their iPhone in a TPU case, drinking from a polycarbonate reusable water bottle, wondering how we're going to refine steel for wind turbines, oil is an incredible useful substance. Let's learn from the N95 mask shortage. It's incredibly important to have national stockpiles to decouple ourselves from the events in the world (like the one happening now).
- Grazester 7y agoIndeed it is useful. It's usefulness was never in debate(it is it's ability to pollute that's the problem) but most of the things you named has a substitute made from other materials exist.
- Glide 7y agoCan entire supply chains switch over that quickly? I would imagine that if something catastrophic were to occur and supply chains had to switch, we would need some buffer.
- animalnewbie 7y agoAnd yet neither you nor the companies selling to you have despite everone worried about the climate emergency
- geofft 7y agohttps://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/ https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/ I don't think any of the "keyboard nay-sayers" are saying that petroleum isn't useful, and it's worth engaging with their actual arguments.
- fastball 7y agoThat comic is a terrible Reductio ad absurdum. The first one is a fair point – Apple products are not a necessity. Therefore if you think the company behind them is behaving unethically, don't buy their products in order to not support their activities. The other two examples – not so much.
- justinator 7y agoTwo naive questions: Does the salt of the actual cavern dissolve in the oil? And does that effect the quality? Are these reserves easy military targets? It would seem causing an explosion in one of these would be catastrophic. I can see why this wouldn't be, but I'd like to leave this question as is to promote (fun) discussion.
- tobylane 7y agoThey’re up to 1000m deep. I expect that it’s rock salt that needs considerable agitation to free it up, and would be easily sieved.
- rckoepke 7y agoYou're right that it's rock salt, and while some of it is mined as coal/metal ore is mined, the salt can also be extracted by gently washing it out with water, as is done near Freeport, TX. The oil doesn't do that because while salt dissolves readily into water, it does not dissolve in oil.
- beervirus 7y agoSalt is insoluble in oil.
- akiselev 7y agoWater is a polar solvent which is why it can dissolve polar molecules like salts. Gasoline is a nonpolar solvent so the worst you'd get is particulate matter coming from the walls, which can be physically filtered out - crude oil has to be refined to remove those kinds of impurities already so the infrastructure is ready to go.
- rckoepke 7y agoThe salt does not dissolve into the oil, it contains it like a glass contains water. Salt caverns are very interesting for storing all kinds of oil / hydrocarbons / chemicals. Most fluids found naturally in the ground (oil, natural gas, groundwater) are stored in porous rock. Rocks like sandstone seem quite solid on a human scale, but do have microscopic voids which are filled with whatever kind of liquid/gas in their natural state. We drill into this rock and the liquid/gas slowly moves through the pores of the rock and come up the well. After the liquid/gas is removed, the rock still remains, there's not like a giant cavern you could stand in remaining underground...it's just still solid sandstone. Sometimes we can re-use these sandstone/limestone reservoirs after extracting the oil from them. Natural gas storage facilities sometimes set up shop and pump surge/excess natural gas into the empty oil fields in the off season (summer for northern states) and then extract it again in the high season (winter for northern states to heat homes). However, due to these being natural formations, sometimes there are discontinuities in the boundary layers of impermeable rock so that some of the gas leaks out of the reservoir over time. The storage facility says basically "Anyone who can deliver natural gas to this pipeline may store their natural gas with us. We will mix it into the formation with everyone else's gas, and then pump it out later. For every 1000ft^3 you give us, we will give you 900ft^3 back, and charge you $4 for the privilege." Salt caverns are very different! They're not porous. underground there can be immense - up to 2 miles long by 2.5 miles wide, by 1800 feet in depth. Sometimes miners work the salt face like coal mines, but because salt is soluble in water, sometimes it is mined by drilling a small hole into it, then pumping water through the hole and bringing saltwater back up (typically this is the method that chemical plants such as the one in Freeport, TX use to obtain salt/chlorine to make PVC/etc). After washing out a lot of salt using water, there is left an enormous void - a room large enough to park many vehicles. It takes a lot of engineering to make sure you washed out the cavern into a shape that is structurally sound. If geologists determine that the cavern is structurally sound, then they can try filling it with hydrocarbons. Unlike sandstone/limestone formations, salt caverns rarely leak much product out of storage, but the salt is rarely 100% pure (92-98% is common) so some of the other minerals can dissolve into the stored product and needs to be removed...but typically the cost of cleaning the stored product is minimal compared to its value. To answer your military question: Yes and no. Yes, all storage facilities of strategic value are mapped by all world powers and targeted in a WW3 scenario. But you wouldn't generally try to cause an explosion inside one. In fact, a stuxnet-style attack would be somewhat unlikely to be able to, as there's generally no oxygen/air inside the storage caverns. The oil is removed by pumping water below it. A more likely attack would be a conventional or nuclear explosion above ground, knocking out the equipment/pipes needed to extract the oil from the cavern. Other targets of similar or even greater value would include any locations where multiple strategic oil pipelines cross eachother and exchange material flows (e.g. Hattiesburg, MS), or where the refining takes place (e.g. Houston, TX). Even just one pipeline not working unexpectedly can cause noticeable fuel disruptions/shortages, such as when Colonial Pipeline had some accidents in 2016, parts of New England area faced fuel shortages. Also, we have plenty of above-ground oil storage (in typical tanks) in addition to underground storage. However, the strategic petroleum reserves (800 million barrels) are truly massive and dwarf the entire private industry storage in USA (above and belowground combine to 650 million barrels).
- BjoernKW 7y agoIn a way, oil reserves (even more so with precious metal reserves, for that matter) amount to prepping at the state level, don't they? I get why in an economy that to a large extent depends on petrol having such a reserve might alleviate some fear. However, I also don't want to imagine a situation where the US actually would have to use this reserve.
- samfisher83 7y agoThis would be the time to buying. I remember when it was 100+ dollars people were saying it will never go less than 100. Then when it was at 40 it will never go to a 100. Then it went to 100 in 2014. It's like people just don't look at history.
- rch 7y agoWhen I was attending Colorado School of Mines (~1999) conventional wisdom held that the maximum price should hover around $80 a barrel, since alternatives for industrial applications start becoming competitive beyond that point. Keep in mind that oil can degrade while in storage, and degrade the storage itself. Taxation complicates the picture for commercial interests. All things considered, the world probably has more above ground storage than it needs, and what exists is already full. From the perspective of at least one major oil company that I know of, this was already the case a decade ago.
- syncsynchalt 7y agoGo Orediggers! Mines '00 here, I was across the street in Brown Building though (CivEng). During the last round of oil shocks ('07-'08) I remember a lot being made about the inelasticity of demand for oil, and how that made prices so volatile. I'm sure that it's still very inelastic, but now that there are non-petroleum transportation alternatives (mass-produced EVs) I'm curious to see what future oil shocks will look like, and whether we'll reduce some of that storage as price volatility goes away.
- brianwawok 7y agoHow much oil demand is elastic though? Over 10 years people can buy less gas cars and more electric cars. But over a month, the car in your garage is either gas or electric. Not that many individual things that can do both. Maybe some power plants, where say neither coal nor oil generators are at 100% capacity...
- maxander 7y agoIf some great catastrophe someday flattens our civilization, these reserves (and others of the sort, globally) will probably be the only oil sources accessible to civilization as it tries to rebuild. They may even be enough - we use oil at an absurd rate now, but for most of our technological development (excepting perhaps the world wars) I'd imagine it was much less.
- valuearb 7y agoLOL. The US has hundreds of times more oil than the reserve can hold, just in other holes in the ground, or in shale. The idea that pumping it from one hole to another is disaster insurance is ludicrous.
- creato 7y agoJust like shipping a few million N95 masks from one place in the world to another as disaster insurance is ludicrous?
- maxander 7y agoFor some reason, though, the oil industry is one of the most technologically advanced sectors that exist, and employs some dominating fraction of all PhDs in geology and related fields. Even though they’re just “pumping oil from holes in the ground.” I guess they just really like their toys. :) Most easily accessible oil resources are long gone. What we could get to if we were reduced to 1800s technology is extremely limited.
- esaym 7y agoWow, I used to live on Quintana Beach, TX. Never knew there was an oil reserve there!
- whatsmyusername 7y agoAre they in the same condition the 'emergency supplies' they sent to Alabama were?
- olliej 7y agoSomething I’m curious about - what would happen if a barrel caught fire? Would it just starve out the oxygen before any significant burning?
- pdonis 7y agoModerators, the title here is inappropriate and arguably linkbait. The article itself does not claim that the US strategic petroleum reserve is "hidden". The article's title, "What is the Strategic Petroleum Reserve?" would be better.
- dang 7y agoRight, we changed it a while ago. The submitted title was "The US has 727 million barrels of oil hidden in underground salt caverns". Submitters: it breaks the site guidelines to do that, and we eventually take submission privileges away from such accounts. There's plenty of explanation for anyone who wants more: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20cherry-picking%20title&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22level%20playing%20field%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... (If you want us to know something, please email hn@ycombinator.com. We only see comments like this randomly.)
- pdonis 7y ago> we changed it a while ago I saw that, yes. > (If you want us to know something, please email hn@ycombinator.com. We only see comments like this randomly.) Ah, good to know, thanks!
- peter303 7y agoThe 2018 Trump tax reform authorized selling 30% of the reserve in order to shrink the federal deficit. They only sold off 10% before halting, due to a glut depressing US energy industry. https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_sum_sndw_dcus_nus_w.htm https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_sum_sndw_dcus_nus_w.htm Line 7 under Stocks list the weekly SPR. Clicks its box, the graph button at top to get a history graph.
- systemBuilder 7y agoI am sure an alien race visiting the earth in 2020 would be astonished to see how frenzied human beings are in digging up meteors (the ONLY source of gold outside the Earth's core) but worst of all, why are these humans digging up liquids in Saudi Arabia and transporting them halfway around the world only to bury them in Louisiana?