Hacker News Reader

Comment by hankbond | Hacker News Reader

Very cool, big fan of these bite size explainers. Has there been more cycling recently? Are the sizes of the caverns tracked anywhere?

View on HN

Funnily enough, I guess the more you cycle them, the bigger they get until they just collapse. So you have a lot of potential storage just before you have none.

If saturated brine is pumped in, then salt is not dissolved from the walls. See better comments further above.

The design characteristics require the storage caves to support 5 drawdown cycles using "raw water" - actual phrasing in official documentation.

Also, the SPR is a complex system made up of several locations where salt massifs have been drilled and hollowed out in the shape of highly specified storage caves.

There are requirements for pumping throughput for example, and some of the concerns regarding operational life and the dozens of partial drawdowns these caves have been subjected to, relate to them loosing the ability to quickly discharge oil.

In a word: it's complicated. I encourage looking up technical documentation online, super easy to find using 'filetype:pdf'. There are a lot of details involved in building, running, and assurances required from the SPR storage system.

id imagine if you have the location of a site that the largest pipes visible from satellite photography would be consistently scaled in some manner with the tank size. this is guess

Reply on news.ycombinator.com