Thread

The engineering behind the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve

281 points · 115 comments · johnjwang

tmellon2 · 1789618875 · focus · HN ↗
Hmm...The Math does not hold up. 300 feet diameter circular area is 1.62 acres. So at max you would need about 1130 x 2 = 2260 acres and not 45000 acres as projected !
From the post :
"300 feet in diameter..."
"To hold 714 million barrels of oil (the full capacity of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve), you’d need about 1,130 of these tanks. If you use the standard capacity of the largest commercial petroleum farms (e.g., in Cushing, Oklahoma), you need about 45,000 acres to store these tanks."
1. Retric · 1789619114 · focus · HN ↗
  You can’t tile circular objects at 100% efficiency and you definitely don’t want these tanks to touch.
  You further need space between them with each other and the edge of your property for a host of other reasons such as being able to inspect and paint each tank. Thus looking at actual facilities is going to give you vastly more resources options than just looking at the footprint of each tank.
  1. tmellon2 · 1789629980 · focus · HN ↗
    You have a point. However, the requirement estimate of 45000 acres is off by 10 times ! I have seen some of these tanks - even accounting for spacing between them; at best one needs maybe a total of 5000 acres.
    BTW - If everyone followed Elon Musk's projection of 100 x 100 miles of Solar; then the US would not need these fossil fuels. See : <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1vq0uu6/solar_is_now_10_of_global_electricity_and_at_its/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1vq0uu6/solar_i...
    Retric · 1789632004 · focus · HN ↗
    Being realistic is the opposite of being off.
    As the article points out fire is a real concern here, which is one of many reasons making salt caverns so appealing. But it’s also a major driver for distance between each above ground tank, you want to isolate risks so a single failure doesn’t propagate across the facility.
    rtkwe · 1789669118 · focus · HN ↗
    Even with the existing spacing tank farms have a nasty habit of catching a large portion of their tanks on fire at once when a fire breaks out in one. It's really hard to contain and extinguish the amount of oil in one of those huge tanks.
    dmurray · 1789638854 · focus · HN ↗
    It doesn't really matter. 45,000 acres for a tank farm, or multiple tank farms, would be basically free by the standards of this project. Yes it's "an area the size of Washington DC" but it wouldn't be in Washington DC, where rent is expensive, it would be on some low-value desert land that the military might otherwise use as an artillery range.
    Storing it in underground salt caverns is more secure, not necessarily cheaper.
    rtkwe · 1789669003 · focus · HN ↗
    Just looking at the tanks ignores the support and access areas around the tanks. Yes they wouldn't scale exactly linearly together but taking an existing farm and multiplying it up to get the capacity is better than just looking at the raw area taken up by the tanks. There's all sorts of pumping and piping that goes into these farms you'd have to route into the above ground mega tank farm version of the SPR.
    We're decades away from the point we could have even possibly built 100 miles squared of solar farm much less the batteries to store it and replacing all the uses of fossil fuel that aren't just electrical generators. Even if we snapped our fingers and magically replaced every extant car, plane, truck and train with an electric equivalent and had all the infrastructure there's still industrial uses of petroleum that would drive a desire for strategic reserves of the stuff.

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