High pressure pump pad at west hackberry.
Since 1976, the department of energy has been involved in a major facilities development program to stockpile crude oil. The strategic petroleum reserve facility program has five underground crude oil storage facilities in salt domes along the gulf coasts of Texas and Louisiana and a government- owned marine terminal on the Mississippi river at St. James, Louisiana. The five storage sites are bayou Choctaw, weeks island, west hackberry in Louisiana and Bryan mound and big hill in Texas. These five storage sites are organized into three distribution systems and connected by doe pipelines to commercial crude oil pipeline networks and marine terminal facilities for drawdown distribution. West Hackberry, the second largest storage sites in the strategic petroleum reserve is located in Cameron parish, Louisiana, in a salt dome that contains 15.1 cubic miles of salt, when measured above the 10,500 foot level. west hackberry is connected to the texoma pipeline, which runs northward to cushing, Oklahoma, and another existing pipeline distribution network. west hackberry has a total of 22 storage caverns with a combined capacity to store 219 million barrels of crude oil and can be drawn down at a design rate of 1.4
Original public domain image from Flickr