There are some articles out there explaining it better but it basically boils down to salt being an incredibly good seal. It basically seals itself off if small cracks form. That means oil doesn’t leak away, and things don’t get into the oil. It makes it relatively stable and lower risk than a tank which could easily get a hole or something.
As a geologist I seco d this, salt is more like a plaster than a rock and super good at sealing itself.
You only gotta be lucky that no bigger tectonic stresses build up to huge cracks, as these can’t be filled easily, but that is nothing that can’t be monitores amd watched for.
Ofc it is not 100% safe, see germanys attempt to bury nuclear waste, but it is a damn good option.
The salt worked well to contain the waste. The issue they wound up having was a barrel burst from pressure (Los Alamos National Laboratory incorrectly used organic kitty litter as an absorbent material). The radioactive contamination leaked slightly because the ventilation system failed to close fully when the radiation monitors triggered. Turns out the salt had deposited in the ventilation shaft and blocked the vents from closing.
It’s also waaay cheaper to drill a couple holes, mine a void out with hot water, and then fill it with oil. Building a tank farm of similar capacity is extremely expensive. Hundreds of millions of barrels of oil is an enormous quantity that needs to be stored somewhere.
The total capacity of the US national reserve is roughly a cube of oil half a km long on each side. It’s basically a decent sized lake of oil you have to store somewhere. Think of a lake or two near you and building the capacity to store that entire thing inside of steel walled cylindrical tanks.
There are some articles out there explaining it better but it basically boils down to salt being an incredibly good seal. It basically seals itself off if small cracks form. That means oil doesn’t leak away, and things don’t get into the oil. It makes it relatively stable and lower risk than a tank which could easily get a hole or something.
As a geologist I seco d this, salt is more like a plaster than a rock and super good at sealing itself. You only gotta be lucky that no bigger tectonic stresses build up to huge cracks, as these can’t be filled easily, but that is nothing that can’t be monitores amd watched for. Ofc it is not 100% safe, see germanys attempt to bury nuclear waste, but it is a damn good option.
The US also tested burying nuclear waste in a salt mine with the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), though with less success.
The salt worked well to contain the waste. The issue they wound up having was a barrel burst from pressure (Los Alamos National Laboratory incorrectly used organic kitty litter as an absorbent material). The radioactive contamination leaked slightly because the ventilation system failed to close fully when the radiation monitors triggered. Turns out the salt had deposited in the ventilation shaft and blocked the vents from closing.
It’s also waaay cheaper to drill a couple holes, mine a void out with hot water, and then fill it with oil. Building a tank farm of similar capacity is extremely expensive. Hundreds of millions of barrels of oil is an enormous quantity that needs to be stored somewhere.
The total capacity of the US national reserve is roughly a cube of oil half a km long on each side. It’s basically a decent sized lake of oil you have to store somewhere. Think of a lake or two near you and building the capacity to store that entire thing inside of steel walled cylindrical tanks.