In Midland County, Michigan, Consumers Energy gas system engineer Dan Jones huddles with his team as torrential rains turn into a 500-year flood event that threatens to destroy dams, take out highway bridges, inundate thousands of acres and cut off natural gas service to hundreds of customers downstream.
In Illinois, with the COVID-19 pandemic just emerging as public health enemy No. 1, Nicor Gas’ Emeka Igwilo and internal and external teams ponder how to deploy artificial intelligence-based technology to protect frontline workers from the coronavirus and keep gas flowing to critical assets, including hospitals and senior living facilities.
On the Sunshine Coast north of Vancouver, British Columbia, FortisBC Operations Supervisor Ben McCarthy looks on in disbelief as a water main and two natural gas lines that serve thousands of customers hang precariously in midair, exposed by days of heavy rain that washed out the roadside embankment where they had been safe and secure underground only hours earlier.
Each of these scenarios, while unique in their details, are case studies in resilience—an aspect of North America’s natural gas system that industry leaders say is underappreciated. In fact, the ability of the system to adapt and bend without breaking in the face of weather-related events and other shocks is the result of a combination of attributes that are undervalued by policymakers, regulators and even operators themselves, according to a new study released in January by the American Gas Foundation.
The study, “Building a Resilient Energy Future: How the Gas System Contributes to US Energy System Resilience,” is the opening salvo in a new campaign to increase awareness of the importance of the gas system in maintaining and improving the resilience of the entire energy grid, particularly as natural gas and electric systems grow more interdependent, said Rick Murphy, executive director of AGF.
“There’s a considerable increase in interest and attention on energy resilience that we’re seeing in policy venues that we interact with, and there’s a real desire to ensure that our future energy system incorporates resilience characteristics into it,” said Murphy. “However, that conversation is happening while other conversations around decarbonization of the energy system are taking place, and what we see is that these policies that are designed to advance decarbonization goals don’t necessarily think about how those policies could impact the resilience of the energy system.”
Several aspects of resilience highlighted in the study—including the ability to compress, store and move natural gas via multiple modes of transport—are showcased in a twice-in-a-millennium test faced by Consumers Energy in Michigan in May 2020.
For two days starting May 17, a spring storm dumped up to 7 inches of rain on mid-Michigan, creating a 500-year flood event that threatened the Edenville Dam, which was built in 1924 at the confluence of the Tittabawassee and Tobacco rivers and impounded water to create Wixom Lake. On May 19, the earthen dam failed, sending floodwaters cascading down the Tittabawassee, taking out two state highway bridges and forcing the evacuation of thousands of residents.
Anticipating the breach, Consumers Energy had prudently acted to preemptively cut and cap the gas main upstream of the dam that serves the customers of Edenville, to eliminate the risk of further damage to the gas system and an uncontrolled accident. But it was a perfect storm, literally. Flood damage and the failure of a bridge severed the gas main in three separate areas at the most vulnerable point on the utility’s distribution system, where it lacked redundancy or alternative sources of supply. Gas customers east and west of the Tittabawassee were cut off.
Consumers Energy’s incident command team, forced to seek out alternatives to get gas flowing again, first considered using horizontal directional drilling to install a new line through the breached dam. That option was discarded because boring could further compromise the already damaged earthen structure. The team quickly pivoted to another idea—bringing in mobile supplies of compressed natural gas to serve customers while permanent solutions were developed. Jones turned to Consumers Energy metering and regulation engineer Kevin Fielder for help because Fielder had used CNG for different applications, though never for large-scale distribution in a crisis situation.
“What we learned is that there is a definite application for CNG in the distribution world,” said Jones. “We always have many redundancies built into our system so that we often have other options, but in this particular case it was a very targeted failure that hit us at a point on the system that was essentially a large, single-feed system, so there were no other source opportunities.”
Fielder located four CNG trailers with a capacity of 120,000 cubic feet each from Rawhide Leasing, which snapped into action and sent a support team to assist on the ground in Michigan before moving trailers in from Utah and California. Service to customers was restored within a matter of days. With service crews performing constant leak surveys to ensure customer safety, the CNG units supplied customers while Consumers Energy completed work on two projects—a new 2-mile section of pipeline and a separate 4-mile section—that would bring a measure of redundancy that had not existed before.
“It’s the kind of event that leads a utility to rethink its strategy on risk evaluation and mitigation,” said Jones. “How can we get redundancies into this part of the system? Part of our permanent solution addressed that, and now there are three different supply options for our gas customers in this area, so it’s basically impossible for us to experience the same outage that we did as a result of the dam failure.”
The last CNG trailer pulled out before the end of June. In all, the effort to restore service quickly involved “boots on the ground” of hundreds of Consumers Energy employees from around the state, the CNG vendor, and cooperation with multiple state and local agencies.
“This was all about the importance of collaboration,” said Fielder. “The resolution of this major challenge involved so many different groups—both internally inside of Consumers and our external partners—to react as swiftly as we could to safely serve our customers. Having any outage is not really palatable, but it seems less palatable on the gas side, and we all take pride in that, so minimizing that to the extent possible was the goal, and we restored those customers as fast as we could.”
Damage prevention is always a priority for Southern Company subsidiary Nicor Gas, which provides natural gas to 2.2 million customers throughout northern Illinois and elsewhere in the state. But the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 forced Nicor Gas to rethink its damage prevention strategy, and its actions provide a shining example of the “operational resilience” defined in the Foundation’s study as “the ability to deploy assets in an effective and flexible manner” to meet new challenges.
A best practice developed by Nicor Gas, its Watch and Protect program, sought to limit accidental dig-ins with a three-tiered “concierge-type service” that included monitoring locating activity on-site and sending Nicor Gas representatives to observe excavations in progress to ensure that safe digging practices were followed.
For an operator like Nicor Gas, which receives about 1 million locate tickets a year on its Illinois system, the potential of the program was constrained by simple math: Nicor Gas could never field a team big enough to respond to every ticket. That’s why, in 2018, Nicor Gas partnered with artificial intelligence software firm Urbint to develop an AI-powered model that could assign a probabilistic risk ranking to individual locate tickets based on the previous track record of the excavator and a host of other factors. Urbint was able to trace 50% of all damages to just 5% of the ticket population, allowing Nicor Gas to focus its Watch and Protect efforts on the tickets most likely to result in damage to its system.
The Urbint software proved its value to Nicor Gas as a tool for reducing net damages. But in 2019, it occurred to Igwilo, Nicor Gas chief data officer and vice president of operations support for Southern Company Gas, that the model could be tweaked to weight locate requests according to the potential consequences if damage occurred—damage to a transmission line versus a 5/8-inch service line, for example.
It was an interesting idea, but at the time it was something of a solution looking for a problem. That changed dramatically in March 2020, when COVID-19 sent Nicor Gas and every other local distribution company scrambling to reduce risk to their frontline workers, prioritize work to keep gas flowing to critical assets and ensure the community’s safety. For Igwilo, it came down to a basic question: How do I limit clustering of workers and the risk of COVID-19 exposure?
“The way we operate, clustering is inevitable if you have a major incident because you have to bring the whole team together,” he said. “How do we manage the clustering risk to limit the risk of our folks being exposed and, also, how do we make sure that nothing would compel us to go to those locations where we know the risk of exposure is high, such as hospitals and nursing homes?”
Bingo. Nicor Gas and Urbint jumped into action to develop and implement a consequence-scoring tool called the Critical Asset Rate of Damage, or CARD, system. With non-essential work being postponed, Nicor Gas was able to more than double the size of its Watch and Protect team to focus exclusively on the locate requests that carried potential serious consequences—excavations taking place near fire stations, police stations, hospitals, nursing homes, transmission lines and significant one-way feeds. From the beginning of April, when the system went live, until the end of August, when some members of the expanded Watch & Protect team were returned to non-emergency work, Nicor Gas recorded zero incidents of damage to these critical assets.
“Going forward, we have to balance the critical assets response with the reduction in the net number of damages,” said Igwilo. “We want to make sure that we are reducing damages, but the resilience of our system is really underpinned by those critical assets, so the model is going to come up with a balance that tries to reduce net risk. It’s going to move from just a numbers game of trying to get down to a certain ratio—damage incidents as a percentage of total tickets—which is what we do today, to really how do I make sure I retain resilience in our system and reduce net risk.”
The situation in Roberts Creek, British Columbia, that confronted FortisBC’s McCarthy that first Saturday in February 2020 was getting worse by the minute. A section of Lower Road—perched on the lip of a ravine above the Strait of Georgia separating the Sunshine Coast from Vancouver Island—had washed out after days of heavy rain, exposing two 3-inch natural gas lines, one serving approximately 3,000 customers in Gibsons to the south, the other tying together the systems serving Gibsons and Roberts Creek.
Just inches from the gas lines, a now-exposed, unsupported water main sagged. The water was still on, and if the main broke, it could have taken out both banks on either side of the road. Rainwater continued to sluice across the road and down the ravine, creating a torrent that took out trees and dislodged boulders and everything else in its path. Local authorities declared a state of emergency and issued an evacuation order for homes on the beach below and other nearby residents.
“I was there for five or six hours, and it was just nonstop crashing and banging and booming from down below from trees coming down and the soil moving,” said McCarthy. “Things didn’t stabilize for about five or six days. Most of the movement was that first day—you could look down the slope, and five minutes later, it would be completely changed.”
For McCarthy, the emergency saga that began to unfold Feb. 1 highlighted another form of operational resilience—the collaboration and coordination with multiple partners that made it possible to respond effectively to the crisis and keep the gas flowing to FortisBC’s customers. While the initial response came from the team of seven FortisBC gas employees serving the Sunshine Coast, reinforcements and materials poured in, said McCarthy, including company employees from all over the province, contract partners from Canadian Utilities and one of Canadian Utilities’ sister companies in Washington state. At the peak of the event, more than 30 personnel were on-site.
It was a community effort, too. After fortifying the area with sandbags to divert the flow of water, one of the critical challenges was to find a way to support the gas and water lines to prevent further damage while repairs were being made. The solution came from a resident who has a commercial house-moving business and leases yard space to FortisBC. He had a 60-foot I-beam and a crane truck handy, and he made a beeline to the site as soon as the call came in.
With the gas and water lines secured, Canadian Utilities project crews installed a temporary bypass so repairs could be made and to keep gas flowing to residents in case one of the lines became further exposed. Spare parts for the repair job were sourced from a Canadian Utilities sister company in Washington because it was closer. For the next two weeks, FortisBC crews took turns babysitting the site as highway crews moved in to make necessary road repairs. FortisBC completed repair work on the lines Feb. 20, and road crews returned to finish shoring up the embankments.
As a case study in resilience, says McCarthy, the Roberts Creek washout was all about “just how everybody came together.”
“Being where we are, we’re really isolated. We’re part of a larger company, but sometimes it feels like we’re on our own day to day, because there’s only seven gas employees [on the Sunshine Coast],” he said. “Most of the times we handle things on our own, which was evident from the initial response to the washout, and then we just saw how everything kind of rolled in—everything happened at once; everyone got involved from all over the province. It wasn’t just the Sunshine Coast, or the island—Vancouver was involved, [and] even some of our areas up north were gathering materials for us.”
FortisBC is adding more resilience on the Sunshine Coast, potentially including a new distribution compressor system that will store gas during off-peak times to keep gas flowing to Gibsons, which was already experiencing supply challenges before the washout. For McCarthy, though, the concept of resilience boils down to the human element.
“It’s more about the people involved in natural gas,” he said. “You may not have a plan, but as long as you contact the right people, somebody’s going to have a plan, and we’re going to put our heads together. That’s what we do. We fix problems. We problem-solve.”
The mandate of natural gas distribution companies everywhere—to maintain the safe, reliable and efficient delivery of natural gas to customers even under the most adverse circumstances—is challenged daily. But LDCs are meeting the test—and in the process demonstrating the true value of resilience in North America’s natural gas system.
Industry advocates say recognition of that value is overdue.
“The overall energy system is evolving, and there are greater interdependencies between the gas and electric systems than ever, and the regulatory construct is not really designed to identify, recognize and value resilience,” said Murphy. “What we’re pointing out is that yes, the gas system has demonstrated its effectiveness as a resilient solution to its core customers, it can be used to ensure the resilience of the overall energy system, but going forward, there are going to need to be changes from a policy and regulatory standpoint to ensure that not only just the gas system, but all of the energy system has the appropriate mechanisms to be able to invest in resiliency assets and to be recognized in the regulatory construct.”
A Resilient Future
The full report, “Building a Resilient Energy Future: How the Gas System Contributes to US Energy System Resilience,” is available for download at gasfoundation.org.