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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Has anything been done to winterize the Texas natural gas system?

Natural gas comes out of the ground with water in it, and is piped around wet until it reaches a processing plant that removes water.[1] Everything upstream of water-removal is vulnerable to frozen water.[2] So, where freezing is a possibility, water removal needs to be near the wells, or it's possible to accept some freeze shutdowns and use more downstream storage. Texas used to have a climate where that wasn't a problem.

This is all well understood. There are plenty of natural gas operations in cold climates. So how is Texas doing on improving their system?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycol_dehydration

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/17/22287130/texas-natural-ga...

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I'm not sure how much it would really be needed. Part of my family owned and operated a gas measurement business in West Texas and I don't recall ever having to do anything special for winter conditions on pipelines. Most of the water and oil comes out with the plunger lift in the well head and is stored on-site next to the well. Trucks come to haul it off and one of our jobs was to coordinate all of that plus maintenance.

There are glycol stations but as I recall those are really only used in gathering systems with a compressor. The large plants will have tons of equipment online to condition the gas before pushing it upstream. The biggest issue we ever had was just baby-sitting compressors in the middle of the night because some of them just really don't like to operate in cold conditions.

I used to test the gas in a lab and there wouldn't be enough water vapor left in the line to cause any issues under freezing. You have far more issues with carbon sludge build-up since anything above butane just really wants to be a liquid. That area typically produces wells with something like 4% N2, 70-80% C1, 2% CO2, and the rest is basically C2+ with maybe some H2S in a few places. It's very easy gas to pipe around for the most part.

??? Texas's 2021 winter disaster, which the Governor stupidly blamed on wind turbines, turned out to be largely caused by frozen natural gas delivery components.

The person you replied to seems to say that freezing equipment can be a problem, not the freezing of the gas/pipeline contents themselves.

>There was not only insufficient power generation capacity online, but also insufficient natural gas supply to the power plants. The failure of some gas distribution infrastructure, which had not been adequately winterized, resulted in exceedingly high prices for natural gas. Some gas compressor stations lost power when utilities began shutdowns, and overall gas supply fell by 85%.

From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis

Look at the dip in Permian versus Haynesville, Eagle Ford, Barnett and Fayetteville. Permian is West Texas where I said I was and it didn't even dip below the previous low. East Texas is a whole other country...

The stacked line chart [1] of daily production by basin on the wiki page is very misleading. Following through to the source EIA data [2] and comparing Feb 2021 against Jan and March 2021 shows permian production down 19% from "average", the biggest decrease of the reported basins. The other basins you mentioned were between 13 and 18% below their "average". Of course this is a pretty big extrapolation from a monthly average number...

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Natural_gas_production_an... [2] - https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/natural-gas/where-our-na...

One related thing that happened was that when the rolling blackouts started, the power companies had a list of critical customers that should not be cut off like hospitals, police stations, etc. Unfortunately some natural gas pumping stations were not on that list (or were on the list but were ignored), so they got cut off. Which of course created a positive feedback loop.

That's very helpful. Press info in this area is politicized enough that the engineering info isn't getting through.

Any comments on this: “Gathering lines freeze, and the wells get so cold that they can’t produce,” said Parker Fawcett, a natural gas analyst for S&P Global Platts.[1]

[1] https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/natural-gas-power-st...

according to "RRC", which I guess is TX's regulatory commission for energy, winterizing is being done aggressively[1], as of Jan '22:

>About 98% of the facilities visited had been winterized. The remaining 2% or so were in the process of winterizing at the time when RRC visited them in the last few months.

[1]https://www.rrc.texas.gov/news/011922-natural-gas-winterizat...

RRC = Railroad Commission, which is the top level of government in charge of a lot of energy things.

Plot line in the show The Son starting Piercce Brosnan. A plot line in loved getting a family member appointed to the railroad commission to control oil distribution.

Not sure I take the RRC's word for things. Of the new winterization standards, gas suppliers did not have requirements to do anything. From [0]

>Analyses after Uri revealed that a lack of winterization in the electric and gas sectors was a critical cause of systemwide failure. The Texas legislature enacted new winterization requirements for electricity generators. But it did not do the same for natural gas producers, which provide fuel to about 40% of Texas power plants and weren’t able to deliver during the storm.

> Since then, Texas saw significant drops in natural gas production during winter cold snaps in January and February 2022. As happened during Uri, production at many gas wells was halted because water and other liquids that come to the surface with the natural gas froze when they hit a frozen wellhead, creating an ice dam and stopping the flow of gas into pipelines.

>...(jumping to 2022 Christmas cold snap)

>Additionally, Texas natural gas production is estimated to have fallen by almost 20 percent on Dec. 23 from the week before, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

[0] https://theconversation.com/two-years-after-its-historic-dee...

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