Not So Fast on the Strategic Petrol Reserves

[AnnieBW]

My husband works IT for the Department of Energy. The IT folks for the Strategic Petroleum Reserves are on the other side of his cubicle area. Guess where the Strategic Petroleum Reserves are located?

If you guessed "The Gulf Coast", you get a fuzzy toy.

They can't contact the SPO at all. Their hot site for disaster recovery was only 30 miles away! D'OH!

This is the biggest custerfluck this country has ever seen...

[ContraBass Black]

1. Does this mean that the stockpiles were also destroyed,

or are just unusable at this time?

[TOhioLiberal]

4. hopefully...

...just unusable. Hope is dying faster than the people of NO, though. :( x(

[rsmith6621]

5. The Stockpiles still need

to be refined......

[existentialist]

7. probably

just unusable at this time--they are stored underground. Get the infrastructure back up and running and they should become available.

[The Jacobin]

13. No

The stockpiles are in oil wells that were sucked dry many years ago. The oil is then pumped back into the ground into the gaps that the original oil left behind. The space was originally sealed so it won't go anywere, but it now has to be pumped back up and sent to refineries.

[ContraBass Black]

14. Hold on now,

Every time a news report mentions the SOR, the show video from an airborne helicopter of massive tanks in an arid climate.

What are those, then?

[The Jacobin]

15. There are military reserves

Maybe that's them. I'll google real quick.

edit: From Wikipedia:

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) is an emergency petroleum store maintained by the United States Department of Energy. It is the largest emergency supply in the world with the capacity to hold up to 727 million barrels (116 million m³) of crude oil.

Facilities

The reserve is stored at four sites on the Gulf of Mexico, each located near a major center of petrochemical refining and processing. Each site contains a number of artificial caverns created in salt domes below the surface. (Note: Capacity numbers may be out of date.)

* Bryan Mound - located near Freeport, Texas. Has a capacity of 226 million barrels (36,000,000 m²).
* Big Hill - located near Winnie, Texas. Has a capacity of 160 million barrels (25,000,000 m²).
* West Hackberry - located near Lake Charles, Louisiana. Has a capacity of 219 million barrels (35,000,000 m²).
* Bayou Choctaw - located near Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Has a capacity of 72 million barrels (11,000,000 m²).

Individual caverns within a site can be up to 1000 m below the surface, average dimensions are 60 m wide and 600 m deep, and capacity ranges from 6 to 30 million barrels (1 to 5 million m³). Almost $4 billion was spent on the facilities. The decision to store in caverns was taken to reduce costs; the Dept. of Energy claims it is roughly 10 times cheaper to store oil below surface with the added advantages of no leaks and a constant natural churn of the oil due to a temperature gradient in the caverns. The caverns were created by drilling down and then dissolving the salt with water.

A fifth site, Weeks Island in Iberia Parish, Louisiana, had a capacity of 72 million barrels (11,000,000 m²), but was decommissioned in 1999. Unlike the other facilities, the Weeks Island caverns were a conventional near-surface salt mine, formerly owned by Morton Salt. In 1993, a sinkhole formed on the site, allowing fresh water to intrude into the caverns.

Because of the caverns' construction in salt deposits, fresh water would erode the walls, potentially causing the structure to fail. The caverns were backfilled with salt-saturated brine. This process which allowed for recovery of 98% of the petroleum stored in the facility, reduced the risk of further freshwater intrusion, and helped prevent the remaining oil from leaking into the aquifer that is located over the salt dome.

[Mr_Spock]

2. Yeah, I heard it was in that area

It will take a while to get it pumping - at least until the power is back on...

[rodeodance]

6. I heard it will take at least 2 weeks to get the refinaries up and running

[Mr_Spock]

10. Yeah, that's the real issue - getting the SOR refined!!

It is actually an empty action at this point - it'll be too late by the time it's refined - oh, well :shrug:

[existentialist]

11. yes, that's right

it's not so much the supply of crude oil as the refineries being knocked off line. (This explains why the price of crude oil shows a slight dip while the expected price of gasoline is skyrocketing.)

(And the companies with untouched refineries are raking in the profits.)

On the plus side this should create additional incentive for the development of non fossil fuel energy sources, which are rapidly becoming more competitive anyway.

[notadmblnd]

8. one would think these huge oil companies

would have access to some pretty powerful generators. If not, then the pretzledent and the military should get some down there.

[crispini]

3. Uh oh.

Is it the people missing, or the oil reserves themselves? How does this work -- are they in big tanks or what?

[rodeodance]

9. they are in big caverns in the ground but have to be pumped out.

[FloridaPat]

12. Aren't they all over the country? There's a bunch in Texas.

http://www.fe.doe.gov/programs/reserves/spr/spr-sites.html