US oil reserves are so low, the caverns holding them could be damaged

Just going to leave this graph of reserves over time here: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f4/US...

> The reserve was designed to handle five full drawdowns over its lifespan. Instead, it has undergone dozens of cycles over 40 years.

It was not designed for American politics. This feels like a failure of applying realistic, knowable expectations.

This is probably a naive question, but I'm wondering: isn't the usefulness of a reserve seriously diminished if using it prevents refilling it afterwards? What was the use case covered by this huge reserve if only a small part can be used before geopardising its future?

They should just securitize middle Easter oil and let us government buy some of it. I guess Saudi aramco was a step in that direction.

Wasn't this known for a while? The problem is that simply agitating the liquid already causes immense wear because these are natural caves selected for their potential as long-term storage, not active sources.

Not to mention that draining them reduces the quality of the remaining oil (much like how you never want to feed an engine from the bottom of a diesel tank).

It's also my understanding that the problem is not just the reserves being drained, let alone drained so much, but also how rapidly they were drained because that again makes things worse.

maybe a good time to say fare well to relying on fossil fuels for energy storage

yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49313444

not just damaged, damaged permanently, like everything else this administration is burning to the ground in our country and just making it someone else's problem to rebuild over the next CENTURY

Question: I don't know much about US oil, but hasn't Trump been bragging endlessly about being oil independent? If so, why is this a story?

[dead]

> Energy Department spokesman Ben Dietderich told CNBC in a statement that assertions regarding cavern collapse were false. “The caverns are always full. All that changes is the ratio of oil and water that is filling them,” Dietderich said, asserting that the Trump administration was “responsibly managing the SPR as the critical national security asset it was designed to be.”

This statement makes me feel worse, not better. Translating from doublespeak: they are acknowledging the caverns are collapsing, and are running it into the ground like every other "critical national security asset".