Gas prices are still high, diesel is at a record high, and the reserve has shrunk more than 30% in six months. While the reserve held around 415 million barrels of oil in February, it now holds less than 285 million barrels of oil — lower than it has been since the early 1980s.
These rapid drawdowns of oil threaten the salt caverns’ structure, says Samantha Gross, director of the energy security and climate initiative at the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan policy think tank. As the reserves get lower and lower, the physical facilities can get degraded, Gross says: " You can damage them by pumping too much out of them."
Cheap, fast to build, doesn’t appear obvious from the air, hard to destroy with conventional weapons. The drawback of damaging the container when you use it wasn’t considered as big an issue back when we knew what the words “strategic” and “emergency” meant. When the administration creates a new crisis every week to distract from the Epstein Files, it suddenly seems insufficient.