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Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

Though note that, for some reason, the last 250M barrels are not physically extractable from the SPR, and the red line has dropped to 284M.

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The "for some reason" is that the caverns the oil is stored in are expected to become geologically unstable if they are emptied below a certain threshold. Extract below the 250 mark, and run the risk that they will collapse and cannot be refilled.

Not exactly "not physically extractable", but extractable only slowly, probably contaminated by water, in a way that is very expensive to refine.

People jump over the details in normal times, but then times get abnormal and impossible things start to happen.

i don't think extracting water from gasoline would be difficult at all, but probably plenty of other contaminants possible.

Mix a spoon of oil in a couple of glasses of water, add salt, put it a few minutes in a blender, and tell me how easy it is to retrieve the oil.

Now scale that to millions of barrels of oil every day.

isn't that how we extract oilsands? by mixing it with hot water.

And they are very expensive to refine compared to Brent.

1. Wait one hour.

2. Harvest.

In fact, a common further down in this thread says that's exactly how they harvest all of the oil: they pressurize it with (salt)water.

Source on that? Not doubting, just curious. If true that explains the Y axis starting there.

It’s in the article. They link to something explaining the range.

At first I thought that’s why the graph zeros where it does, but it’s Y axis starts at 200M.

Good summary about the physical and statutory limits

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/less-300-million-barr...

The red line is a percentage. Axis on the right.

Not quite - the red line is a percentage of "total stocks". That should mean a number equal or greater than the reserve. Also, the percentage axis starts at 16, not zero, so the problem remains.

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