The reliability aspect of this self-contained system is quite impressive. Over the course of my life, I've personally experience many power outages, water outages, cell service outages, internet outages, etc. but never a natural gas outage.
Sadly, the outages and possible the loss of life connected to it could have been prevented if the gas companies hadn't fought back against stricter weatherization rules[^0].
> they made recommendations to the Railroad Commission to implement weatherization rules on the natural gas supply chain because there had been water coming up from the formations — it's called produced water, it's naturally occurring — and it was freezing at the top of the wellheads and restricting gas flow both at the wellheads and in pipelines.
And yes, the Railroad Commission is not in charge of trains, but oil and gas in Texas.
[^0]: https://www.volts.wtf/p/whats-the-deal-with-the-texas-railro...
> When load is being shed involuntarily, customers designated as “critical load” can be exempted. Critical load is typically demand from entities, such as hospitals, for whom a power interruption could be extremely costly. To be deemed as critical, the customer must first file paperwork. The winter storm revealed that certain parts of the natural gas supply chain – such as natural gas compressor stations – were not designated as critical load. In consequence, their power was cut, thereby reducing flows of natural gas along the state’s pipeline network and contributing to partial and complete derates at multiple natural gas power generation units. The loss of their output in turn necessitated further load shedding, potentially creating an unstable feedback loop. This represented a single point of failure in the energy supply system.
https://www.bakerinstitute.org/sites/default/files/2022-02/i... (pages 13-17)
https://engineering.cmu.edu/news-events/news/2023/04/25-gas-... ("U.S. natural gas pipelines vulnerable to electric outages")
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104061902... | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tej.2023.107251 ("How vulnerable are US natural gas pipelines to electric outages?")
Those should be the first requirements before being able to be deemed critical.
Heck, I’m familiar with some orgs that sell their backup generator capacity to be on-call to the grid in the event of supply shortage. To them it’s a profitable load test that reduces the risk of outage.
Strong agree; however, it would be highly unusual to find that any facility that knows to file critical load paperwork has neglected this, so I'm not sure that it would actually do much other than inconvenience the process.
I suppose gas distribution networks tend to be over-engineered for safety because if something goes wrong, it goes really wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrimack_Valley_gas_explosion...
It would be so great to regulate fixing that instead of getting rid of it entirely.
ie - we should responsibly use all the excess natural gas rather than flaring it?