West Hackberry Strategic Petroleum Reserve Storage Area, Louisiana

One of the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) storage facilities. Originally, five previously developed brine caverns were acquired here, and converted to 49-million-barrels of oil storage capacity. The Department of Energy has since developed 17 additional 10- million-barrel storage caverns to complete the 221-million-barrel storage capacity site. West Hackberry connects to the Sun Marine Terminals at Nederland, TX, through a 43-mile, 42-inch diameter pipeline. In addition, a pipeline constructed to the Lake Charles refining site ties in with the Shell-22 common carrier pipeline. Through these two pipelines, West Hackberry's caverns can supply crude oil at a drawdown rate of 1,300,000 barrels per day. There are also three natural gas and 12 petroleum gas caverns here capable of storing another 40 million barrels of gas, and operated by private companies.