The Nation : The Sinking Feeling That May Cost Us $100 Million

In May, 1992, a security guard at the Strategic Petroleum Reserve on Weeks Island, a coastal finger off South Louisiana, walked into sinking soil. He pulled himself out, but govern ment officials found themselves in a $100-million quagmire.

That’s the estimated cost, according to Department of Energy and reserve officials, of relocating 73 million barrels of oil stored in a converted salt mine to other sites along the Louisiana-Texas coast. Engineers monitoring ground water flow into the chamber, at a rate of 2 gallons a minute, consider closure inevitable. Short of that, there is a risk of environmental damage and oil loss.

The department’s $100-million mistake throws a spotlight on the sometimes sophistry of science and on how government myopically funds projects that nature resists.

Begun after the 1973 Arab oil embargo, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is a $4.5-billion federal program that oversees storage of 750 million barrels of oil, a six-week emergency backup in the event of a national supply interruption. In 1975, department planners concluded that underground caverns located in deep salt domes were the best storage sites. Of the six sites the Energy Department bought, Weeks Island stood apart because it had once been a salt mine.

The soil sinkage is actually on land owned by the Morton Salt Company, which does commercial mining on most of the island. The Energy Department bought the oil-storage site from Morton for $40 million in 1978, building a complex worth $222 million today. Morton had an existing system of subterranean chambers and corridors that the Strategic Petroleum Reserve simply converted to hold oil. Oil is now pushing up, causing a split in the upper ridge that is softened by water flowing down.

Sinkholes aren’t unusual in salt mining. Old mine roofs can gradually give way, creating stresses in the crystalographic formation. But with petroleum stored in a cavity, geologists and engineers have no access to the interior to fix the problem.

“Any structures under ground could be impacted,” says Wilma Subra, a chemist and environmental activist in New Iberia who has been critical of the the reserve. Marshes and wetlands on Weeks Island are “a fragile environment,” she adds. “Even though all the experts say the salt will maintain its integrity when you store (oil) in it, things start to happen.”

Concerns about the Strategic Petroleum Reserve began trickling out in a 1984 report by Sandia, a government research laboratory in Albuquerque, N.M.: “The geometry of the Weeks Island salt dome has been defined by Morton based on subsurface geophysics and shallow drilling. Dome contours and top-of-salt elevations from the shallow drilling were provided to the (Department of Energy) in 1977 during the acquisition of the mine, but no attempt has been made to verify the dome geometry. In addition, none of the geophysical or drilling data used in defining the dome geometry were obtained from Morton during any previous investigation.”

“That’s pretty risky--going in and accepting those data . . . with that much storage of oil,” says Dr. Louis Dellwig, retired professor of geology at University of Kansas and a salt-dome expert, when asked about the report. “They saved a nickel but it’s going to cost them a lot of dimes. I would have thought they’d have done their own geophysical work. You drill down and learn where the salt is.”

But drilling for subsurface samples to determine dimensions of the salt would have been expensive. Or the reserve could have injected water into a cavity, flushing out more space. The cheapest route--conversion of the mine--led to a $100-million hole.

The reserve’s site management at Weeks Island was subcontracted to Boeing Petroleum Services, which was criticized for shoddy environmental practices in a 1992 internal Department of Energy investigation. The report specifically mentioned subsidence rates at Weeks Island and “concern regarding possible salt fractures in the vicinity of the shafts, which could, in turn, lead to water incursion into the mine.” The sinkhole developed several months later.

In 1993, with government defense spending waning, Boeing scaled back its petroleum operations outside of Seattle and did not rebid for the Weeks Island contract. It suffered no penalties for the abundant failures cited by its government-check dispenser.

At least two geologists on the reserve project believe it should continue operations. One of them says a Department of Energy pullout reflects “an ultraconservative atmosphere. If they wanted to take chances down the road, they could continue with the project. . . . But if (they) make a wrong guess and there’s a major collapse, you’re looking at millions of barrels of oil flowing to the surface. So they’re taking the safest route.”

Engineers are pumping salt water into the sinkhole to reduce its rate of collapse, while mapping transfer plans--by pipe, ship and rail--of the oil to other sites.

A phase-out decision by Secretary Hazel O’Leary would make Weeks Island the second Strategic Petroleum Reserve site decommissioned by her department. In 1990, the Sulphur Mines site, also in Louisiana, with a 26-million barrel capacity, was shut down and sold for $400,000. The Energy Department decided it was more cost-effective to store the oil at Big Hill, near Beaumont, Texas. Most of the oil at Weeks Island will probably go to Big Hill as well, which has the largest storage capacity: 160 million barrels.

“I guess if there’s any lesson here, it’s that without good information, it’s impossible to make decisions that are reliable,” says William A. Fontenot, community liaison officer for environmental quality in the state attorney general’s office.

“The history of industrial development in Louisiana is that projects are justified after the decision is made to go ahead with them rather than by determining upfront what the possible adverse impacts and costs are going to be--the real risks to human health, the environment and the economy.”

Similarly, the history of defense industries since the Vietnam War is littered with boondoggles and cost-overruns. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve’s sinkhole does not suggest corruption--just incompetence.