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The Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) is an emergency petroleum store maintained by the United States Department of Energy. The US SPR is the largest emergency supply in the world with the current capacity to hold up to 1 billion barrels (116 million m³) of crude oil. more...
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The second largest emergency supply of petroleum is Japan's with a 2003 reported capacity of 579 million barrels.
The current inventory is displayed on the SPR's website.
The purpose of the reserve is to mitigate temporary supply disruptions. According to the World Factbook, the United States imports a net 12 million barrels of oil a day (MMbd), so the SPR holds about a 57-day supply. However, the maximum total withdrawal capablility from the SPR is only 4.4 MMbd.
In George W. Bush's State of the Union address on 23 January 2007, the President asked Congress to double the size of the reserve.
Facilities
The reserve is stored at four sites on the Gulf of Mexico, each located near a major center of petrochemical refining and processing. Each site contains a number of artificial caverns created in salt domes below the surface. (Note: Capacity numbers may be out of date.)
Bryan Mound - located near Freeport, Texas. Has a capacity of 226 million barrels (36,000,000 m³).;
Big Hill - located near Winnie, Texas. Has a capacity of 160 million barrels (25,000,000 m³).;
West Hackberry - located near Lake Charles, Louisiana. Has a capacity of 219 million barrels (35,000,000 m³).;
Bayou Choctaw - located near Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Has a capacity of 72 million barrels (11,000,000 m³).;
Richton, Mississippi. In February 2007, Secretary of the Energy Department Samuel Bodman announced the creation of a new site.;
Individual caverns within a site can be up to 1000 m below the surface, average dimensions are 60 m wide and 600 m deep, and capacity ranges from 6 to 30 million barrels (1 to 5 million m³). Almost $4 billion was spent on the facilities. The decision to store in caverns was taken to reduce costs; the Dept. of Energy claims it is roughly 10 times cheaper to store oil below surface with the added advantages of no leaks and a constant natural churn of the oil due to a temperature gradient in the caverns. The caverns were created by drilling down and then dissolving the salt with water.
A fifth site, Weeks Island in Iberia Parish, Louisiana, had a capacity of 72 million barrels (11,000,000 m³), but was decommissioned in 1999. Unlike the other facilities, the Weeks Island caverns were a conventional near-surface salt mine, formerly owned by Morton Salt. In 1993, a sinkhole formed on the site, allowing fresh water to intrude into the caverns.
Because of the caverns' construction in salt deposits, fresh water would erode the walls, potentially causing the structure to fail. The caverns were backfilled with salt-saturated brine. This process, which allowed for recovery of 98% of the petroleum stored in the facility, reduced the risk of further freshwater intrusion, and helped prevent the remaining oil from leaking into the aquifer that is located over the salt dome.
Read more at Wikipedia.org
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