How would your family, and a hundred thousand other families, like to be stuck in your cars for days at minus 16 degrees?
The death toll would be huge. It almost happened in New England in 1989.
And in Texas this week.
I was part of the 1989 Freeze and have some hopefully interesting insights.
In 1989, the weather just before Christmas was terrible. Cold temperature records were set from Texas to New England.
That year, I was responsible for a midcontinent gas gathering system that normally produced about 500 million cubic feet (MMCFD) of natural gas a day. That could supply up to 2 million New England homes. During the 1989 Freeze, we produced 30 MMCFD, roughly a 95% decline. Similar results were happening throughout the Oil Patch. Supply cratered.
Meanwhile, demand for natural gas was exploding, almost literally (more on that below). While the midcontinent temperatures were low enough to freeze gas wells, New England had dangerous arctic temperatures of minus 16 degrees. This created huge natural gas demand for home heating in a major New England town.
The city ultimately weathered that crisis through luck.
Several years later, I was fortunate enough to get to know some of the city’s gas utility personnel who were operating the gas grid during the Freeze. They gave me invaluable insights into what really happened. (I promised the operators I would not name the city.)
Your city gas company takes gas from high-pressure interstate and intrastate gas pipelines. The gas then moves to customers through its lower-pressured gas distribution pipes. The gas pressure decrease as it as moves to the customers. Normally the utilities’ inlet gas pressure is more than enough for them to supply gas safely.
With 1989 gas production down dramatically and demand exploding, the high-pressure gas system could not supply enough gas to meet demand. This resulted in decreasing line pressures in the high-pressure supply system, lowering the gas utilities’ inlet gas pressure.
The utility’s inlet pressures were so low, and dropping, that soon the distribution system pressures would be below atmospheric pressure. Air could then flow into the gas pipelines. Typically, back-flow valves stop that. Since many of the furnaces were old and converted from prior fuels (oil, coal), proper valving was a big problem.
Oxygen in natural pipelines is incredibly dangerous. Whole city blocks could be destroyed in an air/gas explosion.
To maintain safe gas pressures, the operators wanted to shed load with localized gas shutoffs. Since all non-critical gas loads had already been shutoff, only critical loads were left. This included houses and hospitals. To save the gas grid, the operators had to cutoff gas to a very large number of customers.
Whose gas to shut off?
Before options were presented to senior management (this call was getting kicked way upstairs), the operators tried to figure out what would happen to the areas that lost gas. Here’s what they came up with.
After the gas was shut off:
The houses without gas would rapidly lose heat and quickly become unlivable.
Anyone who had any kind of electric space heater would plug it in.
That would blow the electric grid.
An electric utility call confirmed a sudden, albeit short-lived, increase in electric load for space heaters would probably blow the already critically strained electric grid.
The electric grid in areas well beyond the gas shutoff area probably would be blown also.
Widespread blackouts would impact not only shut off gas customers. It would kill the electric blowers in furnaces that could still get gas. How many? No way of knowing.
Lots and lots of people are in the cold and in the dark.
Many would probably get in their cars for heat and try to drive somewhere, although in reality there is nowhere for that many people to go.
All the traffic lights would be out, creating a massive traffic jam, trapping many tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands)?
Since the blackouts killed the electric gasoline pumps, filling your tank would be impossible.
As cars ran out of gas, abandoned cars would block traffic and create massive traffic jams, possibly for days.
This could stop access for ambulances, police, fire trucks, etc.
When the operators started thinking about the near-term (overnight) body count, they stopped that discussion and called management for a decision on what to do.
Management called the mayor and asked him: what section of town would he liked to shutoff? The Italian neighborhood, the black, the Irish, the elite section, or the hospital district? What politician will ever make that call? Would you?
The decision was made to just let the gas system pressure drop and hope it would stay high enough to get by. If it didn’t, a few blown up neighborhoods would be less damage than a gas shutoff.
Luck saved them. An unexpected break in the weather lowering demand, along with some unexpected supplies, saved the city.
If you aren’t properly scared, all this relates to the short-term deaths. Longer-term deaths from a gas shutoff were incalculable. Why?
Houses that lose heat either due to a gas shutoff or a blackout would quickly fall below freezing, bursting their water pipes. Their basements would flood, getting water into the furnace and possibly the connecting gas lines. The water would then freeze.
Before the gas system could restart, every furnace and gas line (water in gas lines is very bad) would need to be manually cleaned and inspected. The frozen basements might not thaw until spring.
The operators estimated that large parts of the gas system would not be operational until May. One shudders to think about the long-term impact of that.
If this sounds outlandish, here’s the head of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas:
The fundamental decision made in the middle of the night on Monday to have outages imposed was a wise decision by the operators we have here, Magness said. If we had waited and not done those outages … we could have drifted to blackout. That’s not just outages, but we could lose all electricity on system, and it could take months or longer to repair that.
With a total ERCOT system failure, as many as 12 million customers and possibly 20 million Texans could be in the cold, in the dark, in their cars with nowhere to go — for months.
Wind power did this to Texas. Be very afraid of the Green New Deal.
Vic was a gas industry executive, cofounded a Big Data/A.I. company. He also tried to solve the world’s worst pollution problem and end malaria.
@ Michael S:
You are so hopelessly confused that I don’t know what to say.
You seem to think that everyone is God’s puppet and we have no free will other than that needed to blindly follow the what you think are the teachings of who you personally think is God (of course, you will say it has to be Jesus) and pray to him.
This permits you to quit thinking and absolve yourself of all responsibility of trying to understand what is really going on and acting to solve the problems (with God’s help, certainly).
OK, be “a good slave to your master because all of you are slaves of Jesus” but don’t count me in.
@ Reader:
“…it is up to us to discern that reason…”
Reader, I think you misread me. I stated that it is GOD who is allowing all these plagues to happen. What we need to figure out, is HIS reason for doing so (hint: it’s our sin).
Do you think the weather in Texas is the end of the matter? If you want to go around pointing fingers at faulty valves, etc. and saying that THEY! are responsible for our ills, you will quickly run out of fingers to point. Many of these happened in spite of the fact that America has had its first decent president since Ronald Reagan. If these things happened under a good leader, how many worse ones will happen under Biden & Harris? Add to this the fact, that all “elections” from now until eternity will be as phony as three dollar bills. Whom will you blame then? Bill Gates? Tony Fauci? Mark Zuckerberg? George Soros? Klaus Schwab? The Pope? Goldman Sachs? How about The Devil, who controls all the above? Are you going to appeal to his Satanic majesty to ease up on the pain? Do you think he will?
God controls all these devils. He holds them in the palm of his hand, and turns them wherever He wants. Go tho Him, and you will get results.
@ Reader:
Just found this on a different website in the comments section: “To quote a resident of East Texas – “Gov. Abbot correctly stating in a state-level press conference that fossil fuel plants were mostly responsible for generation capacity going offline, then having the temerity, the sheer fucking audacity, to go on Fox News and lie through his teeth about how wind turbines and solar were to blame.””
Ha-ha!
@ Michael S:
“…it is up to us to discern that reason…”
It is really simple.
Tthe reason is that “… government of the people, by the people, for the people…” DID “… perish from the earth”, and was replaced by government of the monopolies, by the monopolies. for the monopolies who, when they tell the government to jump, the only response they get is “How high?”
To wit:
1) the endless wars and the US “foreign aid” to various countries is in reality a government subsidy for the US military-industrial complex;
2) the endless stream of immigrants from Latin America is in reality a government subsidy to those American corporations who take over the land, water, and other resources of Latin American countries and run the local population off the land without any compensation;
this also ensures an endless stream of cheap labor into the US, taking jobs away from the American citizens and burdening the American taxpayers by forcing them to provide for these people;
3) the destruction of the REAL economy that the US used to have before the big business decided to move it to China in order to increase their profit margins by making goods for pennies and selling them for dollars to the “rich Americans” (who increasingly rely on public aid and Social Security for their income – the parasites!)
4) “THE VIRUS” scare is in reality a subsidy to the Big Pharma and its rich investors (example – Bill Gates) – before the hysteria started, the rate of flu vaccinations in the US was down to 40%, and the absence of real economy was threatening to finally bring the house down, so here was a convenient excuse to enrich the richest and enslave the rest of us under false pretenses;
they are getting bolder – there is a new scare coming of an old virus with a new huge mortality rate, and there is talk about continuing to wear our muzzles into 2022;
4) I am sure someone else can think of a few more things to add to the list.
Documents about cutting off TX. https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2021/02/f82/DOE%20202%28c%29%20Emergency%20Order%20-%20ERCOT%2002.14.2021.pdf
@ Michael S:
Edgar, I’m sorry for calling you an “idiot”, which you are not. You were obviously wrong about the gas; but that isn’t a problem. I wondered why you went out of your way to call me an “ubiquitous busybody”. You were wrong about the gas freezing, as was another poster here, and I thought to set the record straight.
You do remember that I have an MS in Chemistry, including some cross-study with engineers. Methane melts at 90 degrees Kelvin. It could melt at a higher temperature under pressure; but I don’t think it is piped under high pressure. Mixing it with other alkanes, which also melt very low (propane at 85.5 deg. K), would only further depress the mixed melting point.
Gas is liquified under pressure for transport by ships; but of course, liquids don’t “melt”. Methane clathrate (CH4·5.75H2O) or (4CH4·23H2O), a “cage” like molecule of water enclosing methane gas, occurs deep underground in gas deposits; but I haven’t read that it forms in gas pipes.
The OP itself tells us why freezing weather can be dangerous to gas pipes:
“With 1989 gas production down dramatically and demand exploding, the high-pressure gas system could not supply enough gas to meet demand. This resulted in decreasing line pressures in the high-pressure supply system, lowering the gas utilities’ inlet gas pressure.
“The utility’s inlet pressures were so low, and dropping, that soon the distribution system pressures would be below atmospheric pressure. Air could then flow into the gas pipelines. Typically, back-flow valves stop that. Since many of the furnaces were old and converted from prior fuels (oil, coal), proper valving was a big problem.
“Oxygen in natural pipelines is incredibly dangerous. Whole city blocks could be destroyed in an air/gas explosion.”
In other words, so far as I understand, what froze was not the gas, nor water seeping into the gas pipe, but exterior water jamming the valves.
I didn’t realize that I would have to explain in such detail to you, when you seemed to just be your usual snarky, obnoxious self. In fact, I didn’t think you were even being a know-it-all. I suspected that you were just set off by the fact that I attributed the “Snowpocalypse” to the hand of God and not to infrastructure problems.
That is, indeed, where these things ought to be attributed. Unusual winter storms happen. Historic firestorms, like what we experienced in Oregon last year, happen. Usually normal young adults breaking into a months-long violent rage without rationality may happen; election fraud of a type usually only found in third world countries might happen. A virus attacking every country in the world, shutting down their economies, never happened. All these things happening at once, is unlike anything since the plagues of Egypt. Re-plumbing gas lines, winterizing wind generators, burying power lines underground, revamping forest management, creation of miracle vaccines, re-educating our lost generation with common sense, etc. — all these things put together- — will not solve the world’s current woes; because God Himself has brought them on, for a reason; and it is up to us to discern that reason and deal with it.
Basically, the gas system in Texas has not been winterized properly.
The reason for that was most likely a simple cost-benefit analysis by whoever owns the pipelines – it is much more expensive to keep these systems winterized on a permanent basis than to have them get messed up once every 10 years or so.
Now they are bitching and moaning and blaming it on the accursed liberals when it was merely the corporate greed.
Also, the rich areas were made sure to be less deprived or not deprived at all of heat, and the rich could afford to simply leave the state like Ted Cruz who simply went to Mexico for the duration.
@ Edgar G.:
Edgar, idiot. You said the GAS froze. It didn’t. The water froze. Ego alert!
I hope there is someone on this site who knows enough about the TRANSMISSION of Natural Gas to confirm that it is mixed with other hydrocarbons,, also with a water content which causes it to often freeze not far below the natural freezing point of water. Also that wells and pipes are not equipped in Texas to stand freezing weather.
And that there are certain protective pipe points at which, gas is automatically cut off when the temperature falls below a certain minimum. And that the gas lines and valves themselves can freeze solid, thereby cutting off any flow. There are several reasons.
There are one or two ubiquitous busybodies on this site who respond to even those who abhor them. They hear things before they are spoken because they have ears like Dumbo. They have noses like anteaters which they stick into everything, and delight in imparting “information” when not needed..
@ Edgar G.:
“I assume that the reason for the natural gas heating failure began because the gas itself froze in certain areas,” I don’t think so:
Methane: Melting point ?182.456 °C (?296.421 °F; 90.694 K)
NW Oregon got hit by an ice storm too last week, the worst in four decades. 150,000 were without power for a while. The main problem was ice-coated trees and limbs falling on power lines. The “wind power” factor wasn’t the culprit.
Can’t blame Trump for this one. Blame God, if you will; but it’s foolish to charge Him.
INTERESTING- The “Austin-American Statesman” news paper ; Total Texas Power sources….;Quoting an ERCOT report.
Natural Gas.51%, Wind,24.8%, Coal 13.4%,.Nuclear, 4.9%, Solar 3.8%, Hydro-Biomass 1.8%.
@ vivarto:
Wind power supplies about 25% of Texas with electricity. The storms and freezing disabled them, broke off vanes, toppled towers etc. SO I read. That alone is enought o start a domino effect. I distinctly read TWENTY FIVE PERCENT, also heard it on a good video programme.
One thing about the article whch I did not think was clear. I assume that the reason for the natural gas heating failure began because the gas itself froze in certain areas,
As for the reast of the described potential major disaster, the very same scenario has been written in hundreds of “thriller” novels, over the years. As we’ve seen, it sometimes happens, although not exactly to thak amply disasterous result, excpet patchily.
I read the article and did not understand anything.
In particular what did wind power have to do with anything.
The initial announcement of Texas’s governor of the freeze crisis said that the gas pipelines in large parts of the state had frozen and were unusable. He said nothing about windmills. Later reports said that the windmills also froze. But windwills only produce 10% of Texans’ hot water and electricity, oil and natural gas 90%. Blaming the crisis solely on windmills is a lie.
This article is from Newsweek:
<how can we edit our comments? Haven’t figured that out! “all of us…”
@ mirib:
I doubt most TX folks know how to cope in extreme temps. I suggest you consult with counterparts in Minnesota. I lived there during the 80s. I can tell you my son played hockey on an outdoor rink at 40- 50 below with the wind chill factor, and all we parents around the rink cheering them on ( frequent trips to the warming house). We had a lower radiator hose heater in our car in the garage so it would crank in the extreme temps. Roads were plowed during the night, nothing slowed down, no matter what. Outdoor activities went on as usual, ice sculptures on display, etc. we had a big silver gas tank outside we had filled once a month to heat our big, drafty house in the winter to the tune of $400, a high price in the 80s.
@ Adam Dalgliesh:
Adam hit it right. What has wind power to do with the loss of other sources of energy such as gas? The writer fails to explain this. His dire warnings are very scary and of themselves are sufficient to warrant an emergency safety investigation including vulnerable national security considerations.
The author details at length just how vulnerable the natural gas and electric power grids were in 1989, years before anyone had even heard of wind power. Then in his last two sentences he blames the present Texas crisis on wind power, while offering no evidence that this was the case. Totally illogical.