Tristan Abbey, a former senior staffer on the Senate energy committee and at the National Security Council, has written a letter to Senators Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) and John Barrasso (R., Wyo.) calling for a bipartisan investigation into President Biden’s releases of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
Republicans have been criticizing the SPR releases for a while now on policy grounds, but Abbey is raising a different issue. “I am gravely concerned that the current administration’s ongoing series of sales from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) threatens its operational viability,” he wrote in his letter, republished in the New Atlantis. “Never before has the SPR released so much oil, at such a rate, and over such a long period of time.”
The SPR is stored in a series of facilities in Texas and Louisiana, according to the Department of Energy. They aren’t the large, flat, off-white cylinders that most people envision when they think of storing large amounts of oil. They’re 60 massive underground caverns, and they’re about a half-mile beneath the surface. The Willis Tower, Chicago’s tallest building, could fit inside these caverns with room left over.
Depleting and refilling these caverns is a significant undertaking. Abbey writes:
The reserve consists primarily of underground salt caverns filled with oil and a system of wells, pipelines, and pumps that use water and brine to control where that oil is transported. This system design is conducive to the strategic mission of protecting the nation during major oil supply disruptions, providing significant volumes of oil when they are most needed. Every single fill and refill stress the structural integrity of this system. In the same way that a sand castle is not designed to withstand repeated waves, neither is the SPR designed for endless cycles of tactical market intervention. The SPR system is also sensitive to pressurization, corrosion, and byproducts of repeated use that can affect its storage and distribution capabilities.
In short, the SPR degrades with each drawdown. The reserve’s caverns, in particular, are subjected to two mutually counteracting phenomena: “creep,” which essentially means the salt walls close in and reduce available volume, and “leaching,” which expands that available volume as water dissolves the salt. The shape or “geometry” of each cavern may also be deformed as oil and water flow through it, requiring corrective maintenance or even closure.
That Biden is using the SPR in a way it was never intended to be used is beyond dispute. If he is also damaging the facilities in which it is stored, as Abbey alleges is possible, that is certainly a subject worthy of congressional investigation.