Tag: Salt Domes

Contextual Collapse

In an otherwise unpromisingly-titled article—“Could the US really release more of its strategic oil reserves?”—the Financial Times points out a surprising architectural vulnerability of the U.S. Strategic Oil Reserve.

“The U.S. Strategic Oil Reserve is a series of vast, subterranean salt caverns in four different sites in Louisiana and Texas,” the article explains. “Many are enormous—the average cavern holds about 10mn barrels, about as much as five Very Large Crude Carrier tankers—and one is big enough to fit Chicago’s Willis Tower. This clever network of tunnels, grottos, pumps and wells can in total hold about 715mn barrels of oil, or enough to supply the entire U.S. with all the oil it needs for over a month”—but those salt caverns were only designed to be drained and refilled five times.

The Financial Times calculates that we are already at the cavern’s ninth historic drawdown, suggesting that “catastrophic structural damage,” including dissolution of the salt caverns, is now a viable risk. This could mean, among other things, that the reserves can no longer be drained in their entirety, as “a minimum level of oil… must be kept in the salt caverns” to avoid this fate, with the result that the reserves’ effectiveness in a time of future national emergency will be reduced.

Of course, this could also mean that someday the caverns will simply collapse. Presumably, then, we’ll have to design and build a replacement—some helpful videos and papers can guide any ambitious architecture and engineering students in the right direction.

(Thanks to Tormod Otter Johansen for the link—check out his Substack, as well as his new book, written with Mårten Björk, called The End of Law: Political Theology and the Crisis of Sovereignty. Vaguely—i.e. not really at all—related: Institute for Controlled Speleogenesis. See also Sea Caverns of Singapore and Burying Bits of the City: Hong Kong Underground.)

Lake Loss

A lake has disappeared: “Four sinkholes beneath a 285-acre lake in central Florida, and one in a nearby ridge, caused the lake to drain completely earlier this month, flooding two nearby homes and killing wildlife. An engineering firm in Lakeland, where Scott Lake is located, is repairing the damage.”

[Image: Scott Lake, minus Scott Lake. (Via)].

In the process, engineers have concluded that “a permanent plug must be installed in the throat of the sinkhole to stop the water drain. The lake shoreline, parts of which have sunk into the sinkhole, must also be restored. The firm must also determine how to refill the lake.” Good luck!

This, of course, reminds me of Lake Peigneur, Louisiana. There, an oil-drilling crew accidentally punctured the upper dome of a salt mine located directly beneath the lake in which the crew had been stationed:

Texaco, who had ordered the oil probe, was aware of the salt mine’s presence and had planned accordingly; but somewhere a miscalculation had been made, which placed the drill site directly above one of the salt mine’s 80-foot-high, 50-foot-wide upper shafts. As the freshwater poured in through the original 14-inch-wide hole, it quickly dissolved the salt away, making the hole grow bigger by the second. The water pouring into the mine also dissolved the huge salt pillars which supported the ceilings, and the shafts began to collapse… Meanwhile, up on the surface, the tremendous sucking power of the whirlpool was causing violent destruction. It swallowed another nearby drilling platform whole, as well as a barge loading dock, 70 acres of soil from Jefferson Island, trucks, trees, structures, and a parking lot. The sucking force was so strong that it reversed the flow of a 12-mile-long canal which led out to the Gulf of Mexico, and dragged 11 barges from that canal into the swirling vortex, where they disappeared into the flooded mines below.

Perhaps now the mines will become a scuba-diving park…