Texas Electric Shutdown: Why Natural Gas Goed Down During the Winter Storm

Failures in Texas natural gas and supply chain operations due to extreme temperatures are the leading cause of the electricity crisis that has left millions of jeans without heat and electricity during the winter storm that ravaged the United States. .

From frozen natural gas wells to frozen wind turbines, all power generation sources have struggled during the winter storm. But jeans rely heavily on natural gas for power and heat generation, especially during peak use, experts said.

Officials from the Texas Electric Reliability Council, or ERCOT, which manages most of Texas ’power grid, said the main cause of the disruptions on Tuesday appeared to be the state’s natural gas suppliers. Many are not designed to withstand such low temperatures in equipment or during production.

According to some estimates, almost half of the state’s natural gas production has stopped due to extremely low temperatures, while the freezing of components at natural gas power plants has forced some operators to shut down.

“Texas is a gas state,” said Michael Webber, a professor of energy resources at the University of Texas at Austin. Although he said all Texas energy sources share the blame for the energy crisis – at least one nuclear power plant has been partially shut down, mostly – the natural gas industry produces significantly less power than normal.

“Gas is failing in the most spectacular way right now,” Webber said.

More than half of ERCOT’s winter generation capacity, largely powered by natural gas, was offline due to the storm, which is estimated to be 45 gigawatts, according to Dan Woodfin, senior director of ERCOT.

Interruptions during this storm far exceeded ERCC forecasts in November for an extreme winter event. The maximum demand forecast was 67 gigawatts; Maximum use during the storm was more than 69 gigawatts on Sunday.

It is estimated that about 80% of the network’s capacity, or 67 gigawatts, could be generated by natural gas, coal and some nuclear power. It was expected that only 7% of ERCC’s projected winter capacity, or six gigawatts, would come from various wind power sources statewide.

Woodfin said Tuesday that 16 gigawatts of renewable energy generation, mostly wind generation, are offline and that 30 gigawatts of thermal sources, which include gas, coal and nuclear power, are offline.

“It seems that much of the generation that has gone offline today was mainly due to problems related to the natural gas system,” Woodfin said during a Tuesday call to reporters.

Natural gas production in the state has collapsed, making it difficult for power plants to get the fuel they need to run power plants. Natural gas power plants typically do not have much fuel storage on site, experts said. Instead, the plants rely on the steady flow of natural gas from pipelines across the state from areas like the Permian Basin in West Texas to major demand centers like Houston and Dallas. .

In early February, Texas operators produced about 24 billion cubic feet a day, according to an estimate by S&P Global Platts. But on Monday, Texas production fell by a fraction: state operators produced between 12 and 17 billion cubic feet a day.

Systems that obtain gas from the earth are not properly built for the cold. Operators in the West Texas Permian Basin, one of the world’s most productive oil fields, are especially struggling to bring natural gas to the surface, analysts say as cold and snow close wells or cause cuts. electric ones that prevent fossil fuels from being pumped from the ground.

“Collection lines freeze and wells cool so much that they can’t produce,” said Parker Fawcett, a natural gas analyst at S&P Global Platts. “And the pumps use electricity, so they’re not even able to lift that gas and liquid, because there’s no energy to produce.”

Texas doesn’t have as much storage capacity as other states, experts said, because the resource-laden state can easily pull it off the ground when needed, normally.

From the storage that the state has, the resources are a bit difficult to get. Luke Jackson, another natural gas analyst at S&P Global Platts, said that physically removing stored natural gas is slower than the immediate and ready supply of production lines and is insufficient to offset the dramatic declines in production.

Some power plants were already offline before the crisis began, adding to the problems, experts said. ERCOT predicted four gigawatts of maintenance shutdowns during the winter. Texas power plants typically perform maintenance and upgrades to their plants during the typically mild winter months to prepare for extreme demand for electricity and energy during the summer. This is also narrowing the supply of the network.

Another winter problem: heating homes and hospitals by burning natural gas.

“In the summer, you don’t have as much direct burning of natural gas,” said Daniel Cohan, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University, who noted that during maximum use during the summer months the demand is all for electricity.

The last time the state experienced a major freeze like this was a decade ago, in 2011. Also at that time the generation of natural gas experienced difficulties: if ERCOT had not reduced the load through the rotary shutdowns implemented during that storm, it would have resulted in blackouts throughout the region, a federal report on the storm warned.

According to experts, it is possible to “winterize” natural gas power plants, natural gas production and wind turbines, which avoid these major disruptions in other states with a more regular winter climate. But even after the upgrades were made after the 2011 winter storm, many Texas power generators have yet to make all the necessary investments to avoid the type of equipment outages, experts said.

ERCOT executives also said this week’s storm took a turn early Monday morning, when extremely low temperatures forced more offline generators to be generated than ERCOT had predicted.

“It looked like the hibernation we were doing was working, but that weather was more extreme than (past storms),” Woodfin said. “The loss of generation during Monday morning, after midnight, was really the part that made this event more extreme than we had anticipated.”

Upgrading equipment to withstand extremely low temperatures and other changes, such as encouraging customers to save energy or upgrading to smart appliances, could help prevent disasters like this, said Le Xie, a professor of electrical engineering and Computer Science at Texas A&M University. Deputy Director of Energy Digitization at A & M’s Energy Institute.

“We didn’t worry too much about such extreme, cold weather in places like Texas, but we probably need to prepare for more in the future,” Xie said. With climate change, he said, “We will have more extreme weather conditions across the country.”

– Jolie McCullough contributed to the reports.

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