Bayou Choctaw Strategic Petroleum Reserve, Louisiana

Part of the nation's emergency oil stockpile, the Bayou Choctaw site has an official storage capacity of 76 million barrels of crude oil. The site is connected to the St. James terminal on the Mississippi River by a 37-mile, 36-inch-diameter pipeline. The reserve originally consisted of four existing caverns carved into an underground salt dome, for an initial 46 million barrels of oil storage. A fifth cavern of 10-million-barrel capacity was obtained in 1985 through an exchange agreement with a local oil company. In 1990, another 10-million-barrel cavern was added, and in 2011 an additional 10-million-barrel cavern was acquired, partly to facilitate the decommissioning of an older cavern which was starting to deteriorate.