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.
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.