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You have a point. However, the requirement estimate of 45000 acres is off by 10 times ! I have seen some of these tanks - even accounting for spacing between th

You have a point. However, the requirement estimate of 45000 acres is off by 10 times ! I have seen some of these tanks - even accounting for spacing between them; at best one needs maybe a total of 5000 acres. BTW - If everyone followed Elon Musk's projection of 100 x 100 miles of Solar; then the US would not need these fossil fuels. See : https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1vq0uu6/solar_is_now_10_of_global_electricity_and_at_its/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1vq0uu6/solar_i...

Retric 12d ago
Being realistic is the opposite of being off. As the article points out fire is a real concern here, which is one of many reasons making salt caverns so appealing. But it’s also a major driver for distance between each above ground tank, you want to isolate risks so a single failure doesn’t propagate across the facility.
- rtkwe 11d ago
  Even with the existing spacing tank farms have a nasty habit of catching a large portion of their tanks on fire at once when a fire breaks out in one. It's really hard to contain and extinguish the amount of oil in one of those huge tanks.
dmurray 11d ago
It doesn't really matter. 45,000 acres for a tank farm, or multiple tank farms, would be basically free by the standards of this project. Yes it's "an area the size of Washington DC" but it wouldn't be in Washington DC, where rent is expensive, it would be on some low-value desert land that the military might otherwise use as an artillery range. Storing it in underground salt caverns is more secure, not necessarily cheaper.
rtkwe 11d ago
Just looking at the tanks ignores the support and access areas around the tanks. Yes they wouldn't scale exactly linearly together but taking an existing farm and multiplying it up to get the capacity is better than just looking at the raw area taken up by the tanks. There's all sorts of pumping and piping that goes into these farms you'd have to route into the above ground mega tank farm version of the SPR. We're decades away from the point we could have even possibly built 100 miles squared of solar farm much less the batteries to store it and replacing all the uses of fossil fuel that aren't just electrical generators. Even if we snapped our fingers and magically replaced every extant car, plane, truck and train with an electric equivalent and had all the infrastructure there's still industrial uses of petroleum that would drive a desire for strategic reserves of the stuff.

Retric 12d ago

Being realistic is the opposite of being off. As the article points out fire is a real concern here, which is one of many reasons making salt caverns so appealing. But it’s also a major driver for distance between each above ground tank, you want to isolate risks so a single failure doesn’t propagate across the facility.

rtkwe 11d ago
Even with the existing spacing tank farms have a nasty habit of catching a large portion of their tanks on fire at once when a fire breaks out in one. It's really hard to contain and extinguish the amount of oil in one of those huge tanks.

dmurray 11d ago

It doesn't really matter. 45,000 acres for a tank farm, or multiple tank farms, would be basically free by the standards of this project. Yes it's "an area the size of Washington DC" but it wouldn't be in Washington DC, where rent is expensive, it would be on some low-value desert land that the military might otherwise use as an artillery range. Storing it in underground salt caverns is more secure, not necessarily cheaper.

rtkwe 11d ago

Just looking at the tanks ignores the support and access areas around the tanks. Yes they wouldn't scale exactly linearly together but taking an existing farm and multiplying it up to get the capacity is better than just looking at the raw area taken up by the tanks. There's all sorts of pumping and piping that goes into these farms you'd have to route into the above ground mega tank farm version of the SPR. We're decades away from the point we could have even possibly built 100 miles squared of solar farm much less the batteries to store it and replacing all the uses of fossil fuel that aren't just electrical generators. Even if we snapped our fingers and magically replaced every extant car, plane, truck and train with an electric equivalent and had all the infrastructure there's still industrial uses of petroleum that would drive a desire for strategic reserves of the stuff.