An NGC report focuses on the physical security of natural gas when it comes to hurricanes
In anticipation of the 2019 Atlantic hurricane season, the Natural Gas Council released a report on the reliability and resiliency of the natural gas industry when it comes to natural disasters such as hurricanes.
Natural Gas: Reliable and Resilient finds that natural gas is particularly well-suited to withstand extreme weather, due to several factors, including:
“For well over a century, customers have relied on natural gas for home heating in the dead of winter,” the report noted. “Driven by the core values of safety and pipeline integrity, natural gas system resilience and reliability are engrained in the industry’s DNA.”
For example, natural gas itself benefits from what is known as compressibility, which allows for additional volume of gas molecules to be pushed into gas pipelines, creating an excess volume of compressed gas, which acts as a supply buffer.
In addition to this natural physical advantage, the man-made natural gas infrastructure helps mitigate major outages thanks to its dispersed and flexible nature. With over half a million operational gas wells in place across 30 states, production, storage and distribution are widely spread. Meanwhile, the mechanical nature of the infrastructure means that it can be operated manually if necessary. The result is that even if natural disasters do impact the natural gas supply chain, the results are localized and minimized.
Natural gas has long been valued as an affordable and low-carbon source of energy. The NGC report highlights another important factor in the desirability of natural gas as an energy source: reliability and resiliency. While natural disasters often wreak havoc on the electric grid, the physical properties of natural gas—as well as the infrastructure in place to produce, store and distribute it—mean that service disruptions are rare and contained.
“Bottom line,” the report concluded, “there is virtually no risk that a single point of disruption will result in an uncontrollable, cascading outage.”