The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve has dropped to its lowest level since 1982, Department of Energy data this week showed, revealing the continued drawdown of emergency oil as the nation weathers a global energy shortage.
The reserve shrank by more than 3 million barrels of oil over the week ending on Aug. 28, the DOE said, leaving the stockpile at 286.6 million barrels or about 40% of overall capacity.
The largest global oil supply disruption on record has catapulted U.S. gasoline prices above $4 a gallon, rekindled inflation and helped set the stage for November’s midterm elections.
They’re leaving it as subtext for some reason, but:
Gasoline is only as cheap as it is because we’re draining this reserve. Which we cannot do forever.
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=WCSSTUS1&f=W
Since April we’ve been losing an average of about 6 million barrels of oil from our stockpile every week. Assuming the rate of decline stays about the same, our stockpile will be completely empty in about 46 weeks.
But I’m pretty sure I also read somewhere that the whole oil refining system will break down before the stockpiles are actually empty, and 46 weeks is hopefully a long enough time to figure something out.
They have to pump water in to the old salt mines in order to float the oil to the pumps. The problem is the water does what it did when they mined . It eats away at the salt. The system was never designed for a complete draw down and running it this low will have consequences. I don’t think they can get the last 20 percent at all because of sludge and corruption and such. And what if the water eats into a huge void in the earth? Oil goes away permanently.
I don’t think most people know they are in salt. Or that they were built in 1977 and only designed to last about 25 years.
Or more importantly, and to what you said, they were designed for only about 6 draw downs. We are way past that. They were never meant to be used and filled over and over again.
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Tanks?
It isn’t tanks, its in salt caverns. That were never built to last this long. That were never built to be depleted this low.
https://www.sandia.gov/labnews/2017/04/21/strategic-petroleum-reserve-taps-sandia-expertise-in-salt/
Crude is thick and they usually rely on gravity head to force it back out of the tank into pumping systems. When the level gets too low the flowrate out of the tanks drops rapidly, this is also why they talk about the “limit of efficient extraction”. This also applies to the SPR, which will hit its functional limit of efficient extraction… Oh, very conveniently right after the election.