but even if they disregard that rule there are physical limits on how low the SPR can be drawn and the quality gets bad as you get down low

My understanding of how the reserve storage works is that the “you can only draw so much before the whole thing is ruined” is kind of overblown because they’re literally just pumping it into geological salt formations and there’s plenty of other salt domes still in a condition to be used

this is separate from them physically not being able to pump out the last bits from the current domes used for storage, though. I’m just mentioning it because when I first read about the SPR collapsing I was like, wow, seems bad. I thought it would permanently destroy our ability to store oil if we let it collapse. But that doesn’t seem to be the case