Publications
Assessment of the Available Drawdowns for Oil Storage Caverns at the Bayou Choctaw SPR Site
The Department of Energy, in response to requests from the U.S. Congress, wishes to maintain an up-to-date table documenting the number of available full drawdowns of each of the caverns owned by the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. This information is important for assessing the SPR's ability to deliver oil to domestic oil companies expeditiously if national or world events dictate a rapid sale and deployment of the oil reserves. The evaluation of drawdown risks require the consideration of several factors regarding cavern and wellbore integrity and stability, including stress states caused by cavern geometry and operations, salt damage caused by dilatant and tensile stresses, the effect on enhanced creep on wellbore integrity, the sympathetic stress effect of operations on neighboring caverns. Based on the work over the past several years, a consensus has been built regarding the assessment of drawdown capabilities and risks for the SPR caverns. This report draws upon the recently Bayou Choctaw model upgrade and analyses to reevaluate and update the available drawdowns for each of those caverns. BC-18, 19, 101 and 102 are predicted to have conditional five available drawdowns remaining BC-15 and 17 have only one remaining drawdowns due to their proximity.