Detroit salt mines, dead mules.

 My dad worked there in 77-78 removing old mine equipment and preparing the mine for oil to be pumped in.  He said it was huge.  Mine lamp wasn't bright enough to see the roof above.

Man basket on a crane was needed to scale down any loose material .

Touring the many miles of tunnels he found an old mule dead laying in the salt that was remarkably preserved. Way back they were used for ore car haulage or supplies.
 Things were either rusted badly or preserved.

I've been underground and had a drill pop thru near me, not this big or kind though.    I put a pipe wrench on the steel if it stops spinning and watch the operator give er shit.  Pretty frustrating having a hung steel that moves freely.

Makes me wonder how close their as built maps were as they were mining.  Seen good and real bad with newer more modern survey equipment.

Crazy.

Question on the use of salt mines for storing oil: what keeps the oil from dissolving the salt?  Do they line the things, or spray them with shockcrete?
Inquiring minds want to know. . .

 I don't know but never heard mention of shotcreting the whole thing. But a lot of the work was stabilizing the ground.

New shafts in the area had to be mined freezing the ground to prevent runaway erosion.   Winter clothing was scarce in the summer in New Iberia.

But I remember hearing that the salt wouldn't harm the oil and would be able to be pumped out by pumping water down to the lowest elevations,  the oil would float or rise and be pumped off as needed.

My bad!

Did he toss the wrench back in when it was all over?

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 10 inch pipe wrench is daily carry tool. A driller wouldn't be able to pull it up or back until it fell off the steel. Took some work back and forth and a little getting western but it would fall off in time.

If if a driller new someone was up to the hung steel, on came the water. And hammer back and forth would keep a guy from messing with it.

After a bit of watching this you just knock it loose with a scaling bar or steel and let the guy go back to drilling.   Maybe ask him later how his day was.

I have worked at all of the SPR (Strategic Petroleum Reserve) sites and at LOOP (Louisiana Offshore Oil Platform), a private facility that offloads oil tankers in the Gulf and stores it in salt domes until it can be pumped out through pipelines to the refineries. The storage wells are drilled into the salt dome, usually with 5 shafts.  Hot water is pumped in and starts scouring the salt and saltwater is pumped out.  The shafts are then used to pump the product into and out of the void.  The screenshots below show a typical saltdome storage facility.   As someone else stated, water is pumped in to expel the oil to the pipeline distribution valves.  When oil is pumped into the dome, the water is directed to the water storage tanks.  Enjoy.

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Most of the midwest and the southern states have a thick layer of salt underneath the ground. Fairly shallow up in Michigan and Ohio, gets pretty deep down south. I didn't know about this until I spent time in Ann Arbor and wondered how they could afford to dump all the salt on the streets in the winter, and a co-worker told me about it.

I remember the story well when it happened.

The salt mine folks abandoned some heavy equipment in the ground.

They said that draining the mine was impossible.

Fuk that. Seen that video before and still creeps me out.

Boeing used to run that years ago.  They got out to avoid the liability of the infrastructure falling apart.

Interesting....

Wait we store oil in the earth by pumping it back in?  Thats crazy I had no idea.

The asian guy with a Louisiana accent threw me off.
But holy shit! Talk about Disaster!

I did some work in a salt mine years ago.  They had 4160 volts running to the bottom and had 30 foot poles down in that mine.  I was working on a 480 volt drill.  Somebody had swapped some hydraulic hoses and once I convinced them of that it was fixed.

We were driving around in a diesel Toyota pick up and before I could work I had to learn all the escape paths and what to do in case of fire. There were red arrows everywhere pointing to the one man lift that went to the surface.

This mine had been started up just getting salt in no pattern but somewhere  along the line they went to a city block type grid and the roads were where the salt was taken out.  I think it was about 1300 feet deep and the temp was 98 degrees and no humidity. Everybody that worked there looked like vampires and cuts healed in no time from what they told me.

Nothing rusted down there but when you hit the surface things would flash rust.

There was an oil well casing that went through the ceiling and on down.

Later I did some work on the surface with them but the novelty of working there wore off very quickly because of the salt , the conditions and the people I was working for.  Only place I have ever seen 1000mcm on 30 foot poles for several spans.

Picture of salt I picked up down there

How would they not?

Everything in the crust goes back down into the mantle at some point.