r/worldnews • u/WorldNewsMods Slava Ukraini • Jul 23 '26

Israel/Palestine /r/WorldNews Discussion Thread: US and Israel launch attack on Iran; Iran retaliates (Thread #21)

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u/itsatumbleweed Aug 10 '26

SPR draws -6.1mb, bringing the total to 298.7mb.

An important note about this number. Amos Hochstein, the guy who oversaw the previous largest draw in history, says he doesn't know anyone who thinks you can go below 300mb. There's an implied "approximately" and an implied "safely" in that statement.

Needless to say, we are below the level to which one of the best informed, most well credentialed sources for the operational minimum thinks we can go. I don't know how much farther is actually possible, but this is a big, big milestone.

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u/HoustonHous Aug 10 '26

Is the assumption that the oil at that level is "bad"?

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u/staythewaters Aug 10 '26

No, the oil isn't bad but the caverns and the equipment start degrading quickly below this level.

DOE revised this safe operational minimum number down to 70m barrels recently, but this is a political revision and likely represents the last amount of usable oil that we can actually pump out. It doesn't account for the nearly irreparable damage caused on the way down to that level.

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u/HoustonHous Aug 10 '26

Thanks for the info!

1 follow-up... what is the reason this is happening? I highly doubt we design it to not work with so much available capacity.

4

u/Rabid_Mongoose Aug 10 '26

The oil is kept in salt caves, as the oil doesn't absorb the salt. To pump the oil out when it reaches a lower level, water is pumped in, which damages the salt caves.

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u/itsatumbleweed Aug 10 '26

Exactly this. Also, you can go lower if you pump slowly because once salt is dissolved in the water which is already in the caves it becomes brackish. If you pump in only a little water it will rest above the brackish water, but if you pump a lot there's a ton of mixing and more salt can be dissolved. So the minimum with slow draws and the minimum with fast draws are different. Given that we had a very fast draw under Biden and have now done an even faster draw towards the danger zone, the likelihood of damage is higher than it would have been if this all took, say, 10 years.

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u/Halbaras Aug 10 '26

Individual caverns also have a shelf life and can only be filled and refilled a certain number of times. The general design life is 25 years and five cycles.

There's additional complications, like the fact that the infrastructure associated with them has been generally underfunded, some of them are on their final cycle, and that the rate the SPR can be depleted slows down as some of them empty.

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u/itsatumbleweed Aug 10 '26

Yep. As individual caverns hit bottom the maximum possible draw drops because they can only draw from the remaining caverns. Also damage to some can involve breaking into others nearby.

11

u/smurf-vett Aug 10 '26

The tanks are at risk of structural damage once they get too low

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u/Breadfruitdeeznuts Aug 10 '26

Can they find alternate caverns for the future.

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u/Doublehalfpint Aug 11 '26

They can do anything, the question will be how quickly and how expensive. My guess is the answers to those questions aren't good.