Posted on 12/31/2025 7:05:01 AM PST by delta7
Maintenance problems affecting the Strategic Petroleum Reserve are in the spotlight after oil releases under former President Joe Biden.
President Donald Trump pledged to replenish the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve after the Biden administration sold nearly 200 million barrels of its stock — but that won’t be as simple as buying more oil.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright told the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy this week that SPR drawdowns under former President Joe Biden resulted in structural damage to facilities. More than $100 million of repairs are needed to bring the storage facilities back to full capacity, Wright said. And nearly filling it back up could cost billions of dollars.
“The immediate thing we need to do is finish the repairs on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It was drawn down so quickly, and that causes some damage to the infrastructure itself,” Wright said in testimony. “Those repairs are ongoing, and it costs a nontrivial amount of money to repair the SPR.”
Wright did not specify what was damaged or what repairs were being made. Neither the White House nor the Department of Energy responded to questions from POLITICO’s E&E News about the damage.
But maintenance issues with the SPR began long before the 2022 drawdowns, records show. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve, established because of the 1970s energy crisis, was created to ensure that the U.S. had emergency fuel if global or domestic fuel supplies were disrupted. Fears of possible new disruptions sent crude prices higher Thursday night as Israel launched an attack against Iran’s nuclear program.
The Biden administration released nearly 200 million barrels of oil from the reserves in 2022, when oil prices spiked globally after Russia invaded Ukraine. That decision provoked fierce criticism from Republicans, who said Biden was trying to keep fuel prices low in efforts to be reelected in 2024. Trump returned to the White House this year after winning the 2024 election, in part based on his pledge to lower the cost of energy and other goods.
The SPR is made up of four geologic sites, two along the Texas Gulf Coast and two in Louisiana. The four sites have 60 salt caverns combined — each of which is large enough to hold Chicago’s Willis Tower. Together, they had a storage capacity of up to 713.5 million barrels as of August 2024, according to the Department of Energy.
The reserves stood at 401.8 million barrels on May 30 of this year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Wright said he would seek $20 billion in funding to pump reserves up to about 700 million barrels, according to an interview with Bloomberg in March.
In the 2010s, government officials began sounding alarm bells that the SPR’s aging surface infrastructure could “begin to fundamentally compromise the Reserve’s capabilities,” according to a long-term strategic review submitted to Congress in August 2016.
Most of the infrastructure at the SPR sites was installed between 1975 and 1991. Work was done between 1993 and 2000 to extend the life of that infrastructure.
In the 2016 report, SPR officials found that 70 percent of the reserve’s equipment and infrastructure was exceeding its serviceable life.
Congressionally mandated sales of SPR inventories tied to the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015 and the FAST Act of 2015 were forecast to add to those issues.
DOE could soon get $1.3 billion closer to that goal. The House-passed “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” includes more than $1.32 billion to purchase petroleum products to store in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and an additional $218 million for maintenance and repairs to the SPR storage facilities.
The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on Wednesday released its portion of Republicans’ reconciliation bill. It proposes to appropriate $660.5 million to buy petroleum products for the SPR and allocate an additional $218 million for SPR facility maintenance and repairs.
The committee also proposed repealing a section of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that requires DOE to sell 7 million barrels of crude from the SPR during fiscal 2026 and 2027.
‘Gooey Play-Doh’ Siddharth Misra, an associate professor of petroleum engineering and geophysics at Texas A&M University, said in an email that withdrawing large quantities of oil from salt caverns — like those that constitute the SPR — can cause storage sites to shrink, or compact.
He said to imagine underground oil storage as giant, oil-soaked sponges. When large amounts of oil are rapidly pulled out, he said that is like squeezing the sponge dry due to stress from rocks above the storage site. A quick removal of fluid causes pressure within the reservoir wall to drop significantly and causes stress on the rock to increase as the rock above it bears down, he said.
“This compaction of the pore spaces can lead to a permanent loss of storage capacity, making it much harder to extract remaining oil and potentially causing the rock to crack under the immense pressure of the overlying layers,” Misra wrote in response to questions from E&E News. “In simpler terms, the site might not be able to hold as much oil anymore, and future extraction becomes a more difficult and less efficient process.”
The pressure on the surrounding rock when fluid is removed can also cause the barriers of the salt cavern to begin to slowly deform and squeeze inward “like a very thick, gooey Play-Doh or taffy that’s slowly moving,” Misra said.
That can put tremendous pressure on steel pipes, known as casings, that run into the cavern and carry fluids up and down into the storage site. Those pipes can get bent, be crushed or break completely by the inward push of the salt in the salt domes.
“This not only makes it harder to get oil or gas out but can also lead to dangerous failures, reducing the cavern’s lifespan and safety,” Misra wrote.
A decade ago, officials began a program to upgrade equipment and facilities that were approaching or near a projected 25-year life span, according to a 2023 annual SPR report from DOE to Congress.
That SPR program — known as Life Extension 2 — is still ongoing.
Kevin Book, a managing director at the ClearView Energy Partners research firm, said DOE contractors are still working through a backlog of deferred maintenance projects.
“There’s still more to do,”.........
Democrats destroy everything they touch!
Exactly. And let’s not forget how Joe drained the reserves to try to reduce inflation before the election to score political points.
Good grief, they could have stopped at the headline, and we would have gotten the message. But no, they have to write up a 1000-word article and of course it’s more doom and gloom for the President. Not a damn thing about Biden sucking out all the reserve we had in there and how it could have hurt us.
If anyone can name one positive thing Biden and his gang of halfwits did for our country, please advise...
Another part of the plan to weaken America they used all they had to do it.
The are still working on new plans.
Maybe a little WD-40?
More destruction from the “Joe Biden” regime.
Gee, I wonder if they could write that headline to blame Trump for the aging cavern liners and the reserves depleted by Sleepy Joe Autopen.
We don’t despise the media nearly as much as it deserves.
There is the slightest possibility some citizens switched affiliations
due to lunatic liberals' idealism and embrace of chaos.
100 Million in repairs is only about a tenth of what the democrats stole to give away to the Al Shabbob terrorist group through the Somalian Childcare Scam. These days 100 million is a Rounding error.
Maybe a useful heads up on this.
Regardless of damage or deferred maintenance, the SPR has always been imperfect storage, because the rock has porosity.
It has always been known that storing 700 million barrels would enable extraction of something less. The oil gets trapped in the pores of the rock and when you try to extract it, everything you injected does not extract. It stays in the pores. If the storage was empty, you could flow water in there at high pressure and wash out the oil in the pores, but there is no equipment for that because no one has ever tried to extract every drop.
It’s not huge. Less than 10%. But not 0.
“It was drawn down so quickly, and that causes some damage to the infrastructure itself,” Wright said in testimony.”
In defense of the Biden Women, there was an election coming up and gasoline prices are among the most visible issues to Americans, so who cares about our long-term survival.
(by the way, these are the people you guys empower when you sit out elections because the Republican candidate is not ‘pure’ enough for you)
“Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f*** things up.”
I’ve always wondered how much oil is contained in Federal land. I’m sure it’s a lot. I’ve also wondered why the Federal government doesn’t produce petroleum reserve oil from our own lands. Furthermore, exploration and setting up infrastructure to have quick access to those areas in case of emergency makes sense to me, but what do I know.
Save the money, preserve the nature of the oil soaked tombs, we wont need oil during a crisis because we have wind and solar! Lol.
All cavers are old. That’s how they became caverns.
Yep, that was certainly a given. But then again, I am glad we can now provide the reinforcements necessary to save them for future use.
“It was drawn down so quickly, and that causes some damage to the infrastructure itself,” Wright said in testimony.”
BIDEN PUPPETMASTER : How long will it take to draw down that oil?
EXPERT : To do it safely plan on 3 weeks.
BIDEN PUPPETMASTER: Forget safety. Do it as fast as you can or you’re fired.
That’s the key thing and completely missing from the article.
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