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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, b
by nostrademons 9d 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 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.
- jordanb 9d agoAre the round things brine ponds? They look like floating roof tanks
- anigbrowl 9d agoI was unaware of this; that's important information and I'll keep it in mind going forward.
- aaron695 9d ago[dead]
- raducu 9d ago> 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?
- simmonmt 9d agoCrude 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.
- jkahrs595 9d agoTFA lays it all out, oil out in the open is exposed to attack/lightning strikes/etc.
- huurtehoog 9d agoAre you advocating for long term crude oil storage in open air oil lakes?
- Tangurena2 9d agoIf 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.
- noselasd 9d agoSun, rain, hurricanes, wind, debris is not friendly to long term oil storage.
- taneq 9d agoHuh, of course. Like in salt farming, after harvesting the salt they wash it with saturated brine so it doesn’t just dissolve again.