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Moriarty, Dylan Michael

Publications and source records attributed to Moriarty, Dylan Michael.

Strategic Petroleum Reserve Enhanced Monitoring Compendium (FY23)

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) is the world’s largest supply of emergency crude oil. The reserve consists of four sites in Louisiana and Texas. Each site stores crude in deep, underground salt caverns. It is the mission of the SPR’s Enhanced Monitoring Program to examine available sensing data to inform our understanding of each site. This report discusses the monitoring data, processes, and results for each of the four sites for fiscal year 2023.

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Assessment of InSAR Seasonal Movements at Bayou Choctaw SPR Site

Ground deformation is important to monitor for the ongoing safety and stability of underground caverns. Implementing InSAR technology to monitor site-wide surface deformation at the Strategic Petroleum Reserve has revealed seasonal ground movements at Bayou Choctaw in Louisiana. The cyclic, seasonal pattern shows soil shrinkage during the spring and summer months and soil expansion during the fall and winter months. Prior to this report, no in-depth investigation was conducted to explain this seasonal phenomenon. However, the ground movement is believed to be near-surface and not geological due to the relatively insignificant movement between years. To better understand seasonality movements, soil properties, land cover, and climatic conditions are assessed to relate near-surface water and soil interactions. The soil, land, and climatic properties all contribute to seasonal ground movement, and vegetation cover and the soil's water capacity contribute to the spatial variability of InSAR seasonal measurements at Bayou Choctaw.

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February 2020 Bayou Choctaw Subsidence Analysis

Subsidence monitoring is a crucial component to understanding cavern integrity of salt storage caverns. This report looks at the historical and current subsidence monitoring program and includes interpretation of the data from the Bayou Choctaw Strategic Petroleum Reserve site. The current monitoring program consists of an annual elevation survey as well as GPS and tiltmeter instruments above both Cavern 4 and Cavern 20. This year's level and rod survey indicates little subsidence across the site. In addition, the GPS and tiltmeter instruments do not indicate any substantial movement above caverns 4 and 20. As such, there is no reason to indicate any of the caverns at Bayou Choctaw have lost integrity.

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