Publications
Assessment of the Available Drawdowns for Oil Storage Caverns at the West Hackberry 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 oi l reserves. What factors go into assessing available drawdowns? 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 oper ations, 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 months, a consensus has been bui lt regarding the assessment of drawdown capabilities and risks for the SPR caverns. This paper draws upon the recently West Hackberry model upgrade and analyses to reevaluate and update the available drawdowns for each of those caverns. Similar papers for the Bryan Mound, Big Hill, and Bayou Choctaw papers will be developed as the upgrades to those analyses are completed. The rationale and documentation of the methodology is described in the remainder of this report, as are the updated estimates of availab le drawdowns for the West Hackberry caverns. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The author would like to thank Byoung - Yoon Park, Anna Lord, Barry Roberts, Moo Lee, and David Borns for their review and support of this work.