Meet America’s 714-Million-Barrel Underground VAULT 👇 The United States doesn’t store its emergency oil in giant steel tanks. ▪️It stores most of it inside salt. Along the Gulf Coast, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve contains 60 enormous underground salt caverns spread across four sites in Texas and Louisiana. Together, they can hold 714 MILLION barrels of crude oil. The typical cavern is roughly 200 feet across and 2,500 feet tall and holds around 10 million barrels. ▪️That's tall enough to swallow Chicago’s Willis Tower with room left over. And salt happens to be unusually good bottle material. At these depths, rock salt has extremely low porosity and permeability. It also deforms slowly under pressure. Most interesting of all, small cracks squeeze themselves shut. Salt heals its own cracks, like a superhero. That combination is why the Department of Energy says salt-cavern storage can cost: ▪️ Up to 10 times less than above-ground tanks and ▪️ 20 times less than caverns mined from hard rock. The U.S. government took one of the cheapest commodities on earth… Removed it… And turned the empty space into infrastructure capable of holding hundreds of millions of barrels of the world’s most important commodity.