Washington: The Biden administration dismissed Republican senators’ worries that the Strategic Petroleum Reserve’s sensitive salt caverns had been harmed by last year’s record oil withdrawal, according to a letter seen by Reuters on Wednesday.
The SPR, a network of naturally occurring salt caverns along the coastlines of Texas and Louisiana, is a source of oil that the government sold in 2017 at a previously unheard-of rate of 180 million barrels. The deal was started by President Joe Biden to reduce the high gasoline costs that had increased following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and as more people started travelling as the worldwide epidemic subsided.
That withdrawal sapped the SPR, the world’s largest emergency oil stockpile, to the lowest level since 1983. It also led to concerns by some Republicans that the withdrawal potentially damaged some SPR caverns. That’s because oil is pushed out of the SPR by injecting water into the salt caverns, which can partially dissolve their walls, affecting the shapes and volumes of the containers.
Senator John Barrasso and Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, both Republicans, had written to U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm in November with concerns that the “rapid depletion of the SPR may have caused damage to SPR’s pipelines and caverns, compromising its ability to meet its energy security mission in the event of a true energy supply interruption.”
Kathleen Hogan, an infrastructure official at the Department of Energy, said in a letter received by lawmakers on April 12 that those concerns were unfounded. “The necessary emergency sales that took place in 2022 did not damage our SPR pipelines or caverns,” Hogan said in the letter, which had not been reported previously.
“The Nation’s top geoscientists at DOE’s Sandia National Laboratory continue to closely monitor cavern integrity, and the SPR remains operationally ready to respond to future supply disruptions, should they occur,” Hogan said.
Granholm told Reuters late last month that two of the SPR’s four sites, Bryan Mound and Bayou Choctaw, would be down until the fall due to life extension work.
That work and a congressionally mandated sale of 26 million barrels from the SPR have delayed buybacks, she said.
The DOE did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the letter.
Hogan said in the letter that maintenance was initiated in 2016 and that DOE’s request of Congress last year for an additional $500 million was for increased costs, not due to damage from the release. The maintenance work “experienced the same supply chain impacts, labour shortages, and other issues that many commercial companies have faced in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic,” Hogan wrote.
Read all the Latest News, Trending News, Cricket News, Bollywood News,
India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
0 Comments: