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Comment by DevX101 | Hacker News Reader

Someone's going to find a creative way to store large amounts of oil and make a lot of money in a few years.

Maybe we can store it in large underground caverns (or maybe porous basins) and then pump it up to the surface only when we need it. We would probably want to coordinate with other people also doing pumping in their region, as not to end up with too much on the surface that we can’t use and then have nowhere to put it.

I assume you're making a sarcastic reference to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Petroleum_Reserve_(U...

I believe (s)he's making a sarcastic reference to oil in the ground.

Is this the same thing as... not pumping it?

The other people pumping are coordinating... against you, not with you.

Nature has figured it out. (I.e.: the simplest way of storing oil is to not extract it.)

Once an oil well is producing the operators can't necessarily just turn it off. If they do cap it that can impair future production.

> If they do cap it that can impair future production.

Great! Let's get started.

For some producers that's easier said than done. You can't just shut the operation down and then start it up again.

And there lies the rub - oil in-place is often in remote, hard-to-get areas; the margin will be made in having it ready to go when price warrants, not ready to extract

The world produces approximately thirteen billion liters of oil (83m "barrels") a day. A billion liters is a cube a hundred meters on a side. Given that it needs to be stored in a tank and not just pooled in a huge lake, that's a bit of a problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-class_supertanker store about three million barrels.

You can create underground caverns in salt using water drilling. That's how the US stores its oil reserves.

Physics would argue otherwise.

And what would that argument be?

I think gas goes bad after some months, not sure if crude degrades as well.

It's been buried for 100 million years, I don't think a few months is going to do anything.

Gasoline and other petroleum derivatives are not a stable as their underlying source. However consumer gas will last a few years with proper care and storage, the real issue will be when appropriate storage runs out.

Parent specifically noted crude

So what happens if you have gas in your car and don't drive it for 4 months???

There's a decent chance your car won't start. The gasoline in the tank is probably fine, but the gasoline in the fuel lines and so forth has likely turned in useless gunk.

Probably buried in a very different environment?

The knock-on price is to refined gas, but when we talk price/storage of oil that's not ready to put in your car gasoline.

Oil tankers are being used for storage:

https://amp.theguardian.com/business/2020/apr/19/supertanker...

Floating storage levels for crude are already double what they were a week ago [0]

[0] https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-global-oil-tankers-storage...

and the prices of storage as well.[1] ( Article quite old, but argument stays )

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-oil-shipping/oil-t...

Sure but those are limited as well, and their capacity would probably run out. Those tankers would have to basically be docked and not be able to transport anymore. And then?

The point is that so long as there's weak demand, the oil's going nowhere, and the ships would be sitting regardless.

Though otherwise agreed: capacity is rapidly being saturated, and this isn't much of a win for shipping companies either.

And the existing fleet is rapidly being saturated. Building new tankers to serve as floating storage is economically unfeasable (negative ROI), though repurposing idle fleet capacity is rational as a means to recover some variable costs. The activity doesn't make profit, rather, it slows losses.

Empty Oil tankers. They are charging over $300,000 per day for storage now. Some think this is the greatest trading opportunity in over a decade.

https://adventuresincapitalism.com/2020/03/19/crude-contango...

Or, we could just burn it, heat up the planet and not need to heat during the coming winter.

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