Texas power outage: why natural gas dropped during winter storm

Failures in Texas natural gas operations and supply chains due to extreme temperatures are the biggest cause of the electricity crisis that left millions of Texans without heat and power during the winter storm that swept across the United States.

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

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

By some estimates, nearly half of the state’s natural gas production has halted due to extremely low temperatures, while components freezing at natural gas-fired power plants has forced some operators to shut down.

“Texas is a gas state,” said Michael Webber, professor of energy resources at the University of Texas at Austin. While he said all of Texas’s energy sources were responsible for the electricity crisis – at least one nuclear power plant has been partially closed, including – the natural gas industry produces much less electricity than normal.

“The gas is failing in the most spectacular fashion right now,” Webber said.

More than half of ERCOT’s winter generation capacity, much of it fueled by natural gas, was offline due to the storm, around 45 gigawatts, according to Dan Woodfin, senior manager of ERCOT.

The blackouts during this storm far exceeded what the ERCOT predicted in November for an extreme winter event. The forecast peak demand was 67 gigawatts; maximum usage during the storm was over 69 gigawatts on Sunday.

It is estimated that about 80% of the grid capacity, or 67 gigawatts, could be generated by natural gas, coal and some nuclear power. Only 7% of ERCOT’s planned winter capacity, or six gigawatts, was to come from various wind power sources across the state.

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

“It appears that a large chunk of the generation that went offline today is primarily due to issues with the natural gas system,” Woodfin said in a phone call Tuesday with reporters.

Natural gas production in the state has plunged, making it difficult for power plants to get the fuel needed to run the plants. Natural gas power plants typically don’t have a lot of on-site fuel storage, experts said. Instead, factories depend on the constant flow of natural gas from pipelines that flow through the state from areas like the Permian Basin in West Texas to major demand centers like Houston and Dallas.

By early February, operators in Texas were producing about 24 billion cubic feet per day, according to an estimate from S&P Global Platts. But on Monday, Texan production fell to a fraction of that: state operators were producing between 12 and 17 billion cubic feet per day.

Systems that get gas from the ground are not properly designed for cold weather. Operators in the Permian Basin of West Texas, one of the most productive oil fields in the world, are particularly struggling to bring natural gas to the surface, analysts said, as cold weather and snow close wells or cause power outages that prevent the pumping of fossil fuels. from the ground.

“The gathering lines freeze up and the wells get so cold that they can’t produce anymore,” said Parker Fawcett, natural gas analyst for S&P Global Platts. “And the pumps use electricity, so they can’t even carry that gas and that liquid, because there’s no electricity to produce.”

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

From the storage available to the state, resources are somewhat difficult to access. Luke Jackson, another natural gas analyst for S&P Global Platts, said the physical withdrawal of stored natural gas is slower than the immediate and immediate supply to production lines and is insufficient to offset dramatic drops in production.

Some power plants were already offline before the crisis began, adding to the problems, experts said. ERCOT anticipated four gigawatts of service interruptions during the winter. Texas power plants typically perform maintenance and updates to their plants during the generally mild winter months in anticipation of the extreme demand for electricity and electricity during the summer. This, too, puts a strain on 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 combustion of natural gas,” said Daniel Cohan, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University, noting that during peak usage during the summer months , there is total demand for electricity.

The last time the state experienced a major freeze like this was ten years ago in 2011. Also at that time, natural gas production had struggled – if ERCOT had not reduced Charging through the continuous power outages implemented during this storm, this would have resulted in one of the region-wide blackouts, 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, preventing such major outages in other states with more regular extreme winter conditions. But even after upgrades in the wake of the 2011 winter storm, many generators in Texas still haven’t made all of the necessary investments to prevent the kind of equipment disruptions, experts said.

ERCOT directors also said this week’s storm took an early turn on Monday morning, when extremely low temperatures forced many more generators offline than ERCOT expected.

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

Upgrading equipment to withstand extremely low temperatures and other changes, like urging customers to save power or switch to smart devices, could help avoid disasters like this ci, said Le Xie, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Texas A&M University and deputy director of energy digitization at A&M’s Energy Institute.

“Before, we weren’t too worried about these extremely cold temperatures in places like Texas, but we probably need to prepare for more in the future,” Xie said. With climate change, he said, “We’re going to have more extreme weather conditions across the country.”

– Jolie McCullough contributed reporting.

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