reply to post by CajunBoy
Ahhh good... someone that's not wringing their hands, wailing, and gnashing their teeth.
Texas Brine- They supply brine and receive brine from the various storage wells in the area. I did the programming for the control system on a cavern
that we called Napoleanville Storage a few years ago. Texas Brine had a sweet deal. They made money coming and going.
The facility that I worked at stored liquid propane and butane in a salt cavern. BTW- The process of leaching a salt cavern out is pretty interesting
but too much for this post. Depending on the formation, they can store liquid or high pressure natural gas.
Here's how it worked at Napoleanville. The company stores propane while prices are low and takes it out when prices are high. At least that's the
intent. It doesn't always work that way. Anyway, when they start adding propane to the cavern brine is displaced. BTW- they use brine (hyper saline
water) because it doesn't affect the size of the cavern. The brine has to go somewhere. Texas Brine charges a fee to take the brine from them. The
diesel pad that is one top of the brine is displaced out and into holding tanks.
Ok so now we have to get the propane out of the dome and on to the end users. That means that they have to receive brine from Texas Brine, for a fee.
Texas Brine pumps diesel into the dome which displaces salt water out and into the dome that contains propane. The brine displaces the propane out,
through driers (water saturated propane causes pipeline freezing issues, and into the delivery pipeline.
So, it sounds like Texas Brines cavern has been compromised. No telling how or why...
The comment about Lake Varret dropping is interesting. I would add upstream drought conditions to the list of probable culprits.
Here's a
LINK to a Wikipedia article about a drilling accident that happened back in 1980.
Things went pretty fast. If Lake Varret was draining into a salt dome and it's fresh water things would go a lot faster imho.