While a key environmental study is not yet complete, the Richton Salt Dome oil storage project is in line for another $25 million under a newly signed federal spending measure.

 
The legislation covers activities by the U.S. Energy Department and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for the fiscal year that began this month. It was signed this week by President Barack Obama.
The Richton money will be used for engineering work on the salt domes, Energy Department spokesman Tom Welch said Thursday.

It brings to $81.5 million the amount of federal funding that lawmakers have steered to the project which would be part of a congressionally ordered expansion of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to 1 billion barrels in the last two years.
Created in 1975, the reserve is supposed to shield the nation from surprise disruptions in oil supplies and currently holds about 725 million barrels.
The Richton site, located east of Hattiesburg, is eventually supposed to store 160 million barrels, with facilities in Texas and Louisiana picking up the balance.
But environmentalists and others have questioned a proposal to draw 50 million gallons of water a day from the Pascagoula River to carve cavities out of the salt domes.
The Energy Department is now studying other options under a supplemental environmental impact statement.
Once scheduled for release this past spring, a draft version of that study is now expected to be published late next month or in December, according to a recent e-mail from a department official to a staffer for Rep. Gene Taylor, a Bay St. Louis Democrat opposed to the proposal.
The staffer, Ethan Rabin, said Thursday that he found it “odd” that money is being spent on the project before a final go-ahead.
But Welch said the environmental study on the water issue is “not related” to above-ground engineering work on the domes.
“That’s why it was kind of irrelevant,” he said.