When the Natural Gas Council released its report on the resiliency of natural gas during times of extreme weather, the conclusion was simple: Natural gas is a practically weatherproof energy resource.
According to April 2019’s Natural Gas: Reliable and Resilient, the reasons start with supply: According to the report, the United States has more than a half-million producing gas wells spread across 30 states. But the reasons go much deeper. Up to 95 percent of the total U.S. gross withdrawals of natural gas in 2016 came from onshore production—up from 74 percent in 1990—which has significantly limited exposure to the effects of hurricane-related offshore supply disruptions.
And when it comes to distribution, the report noted that the nation’s 2.5 million-mile natural gas pipeline network doesn’t just offer the flexibility of multiple delivery pathways, but it provides security as well. The major long-haul pipelines—which transport approximately one-fourth of the energy consumed in the United States—can continue moving gas when a supply source has been removed, and compressor stations are often constructed to allow natural gas to flow even when stations are down.
Natural gas can also be stored, a quality that is vital during extreme weather events like a hurricane or a period of intense cold like this past January’s polar vortex.
Although there is no “typical” hurricane, Hurricane Harvey was particularly unique, according to Steve Greenley, senior vice president of gas operations for CenterPoint Energy.
“For us, Harvey was really two different storms,” he said of the historic hurricane, which ravaged Texas and Louisiana in August 2017, causing an estimated $125 billion in damages. “The southern part of our natural gas footprint in Texas was hit with a Category 4 hurricane that made landfall in Rockport. Fast forward a few days, and our territory in the Greater Houston area over into Beaumont was dealing with 52 inches of rain in a three- or four-day period—and the catastrophic flooding that went with it.”
While each of those storms brought its own challenges, preparedness efforts—particularly the company’s Emergency Operations Plan that is reviewed and drilled annually—ensured that employees and leadership teams were ready.
Crucial to the EOP is CenterPoint Energy’s adoption of the incident command structure, which is a framework to align the hierarchy of its response and is similar to what is used by other emergency responders and emergency management groups.
“Having an incident commander and representatives of other groups, such as operations, logistics, human resources, communications, finance, etc., helps us grow and adapt based on current needs throughout the emergency situation,” Greenley said.
Part of that flexibility includes having contracts and vendor relationships in place to provide services for the employees supporting the restoration and recovery—everything from on-site showers, lodging and day care to basic needs like food, ice and water.
“Certainly any of the things that impact the communities we serve are impacting our employees, too,” he said.
During Harvey, the flexibility built into CenterPoint Energy’s plan was evident when it came to its response. More than 1,050 EOP responders assessed more than 130,000 gas meters for damage, responded to 824 gas emergency orders, inspected 83 stations and surveyed 554 miles of wind-impacted areas in South Texas.
“One of the things that we learned and adjusted for very well within the storm—and now have more robust plans in place around—is around specialized equipment like airboats,” Greenley said. “Part of the challenge was just the logistics of getting to some places, so having equipment like airboats and high-water vehicles, which we might not have in our own fleet but could procure quickly, proved to be useful as we worked to get our people in position to respond.”
Harvey also provided CenterPoint Energy the opportunity to utilize drones, which helped reach areas inaccessible because of high water and gave the public a visual understanding of the scope of the storm’s effects and the level of CenterPoint Energy’s response.
“The imagery the drones provided and being able to talk to our customers through social media about what we were seeing and what was going on in our areas was incredibly beneficial from a customer engagement standpoint,” he said.
Hurricane Harvey also proved to be a great test for the microgrid technology developed by Houston-based Enchanted Rock. The 13-year-old company provides customers with natural gas-fueled backup generators that can run indefinitely thanks to underground pipelines, which are unaffected by wind, flooding or other ground-level utility interruptions. Because this reliability is provided as a service, customers who might otherwise not want to manage their own generators can enjoy having almost instantaneous backup power without the cost or headache of owning generators.
The technology, which allows customers to disconnect from the grid and run in “island mode” by drawing power from the generator, has several obvious advantages over typical diesel backup generators, including lower emissions, less noise and an uninterrupted fuel supply. However, Enchanted Rock’s most exciting advantage is its innovative business model.
“While the nature of our technology is unique, the business model is also unique. Because we retain ownership, we have the ability to run these assets in the wholesale electric market, selling services opportunistically,” said Allan Schurr, Enchanted Rock’s chief commercial officer. “It makes sense to provide our capacity into the grid and get paid for it, and those revenue streams from the grid underwrite the cost of the assets, so that the resiliency as a service contract with the host customer is typically at a fraction of the cost of purchasing and operating their own generator.”
According to Schurr, Enchanted Rock has this arrangement with approximately 120 sites, which means that when an extreme weather event rolls in, 120 separate microgrids are ready to pick up customer load within 10 seconds of an outage.
“We can carry a customer’s load indefinitely so long as the fuel is available, and studies have shown that the supply chain for natural gas systems has far greater resiliency than that of a diesel equivalent,” he said.
He pointed to a March 2019 study conducted by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and funded by Enchanted Rock, A Comparison of Fuel Choice for Backup Generators, which concludes natural gas is a more resilient fuel choice than diesel.
During Harvey, some customers did not want to wait until the power went out, so they requested to go into island mode before the storm hit to be better prepared.
Perhaps the most shining example of the benefits of natural gas-fueled generator systems can be found at Buc-ee’s, a massive convenience store with more than 100 gas pumps and a retail food store. When Harvey hit, the company’s Katy location was stocked and ready—but not yet open for business. It was, however, fully powered thanks to its microgrid system, a fact that was not unnoticed by the National Guard.
After a few phone calls, the National Guard made the Katy Buc-ee’s its emergency headquarters. The location had everything it needed: fuel, restroom facilities, food and food preparation facilities.
“It’s just a tremendous example that the need for power in emergencies should not be an afterthought; it should be something that people can depend on in an emergency,” Schurr said. “Workers found a beacon of light—literally—and followed it, took it over and probably assisted in more timely rescues and a more seamless recovery.”
Snow and ice present another unique challenge. When the polar vortex of 2019 blew through the upper Midwest, Naperville, Illinois-based Nicor Gas delivered more than 4.8 billion cubic feet of natural gas to its 2.2 million customers, surpassing the previous record for the company’s single largest delivery of natural gas set during the polar vortex of 2014.
Nicor Gas received more than 7,000 customer calls during the event, responding to nearly 1,500 emergency calls for service during the two days of the most extreme subzero temperatures, which reached as cold as minus 23 degrees at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport.
Even with all of that, there were no major service outages.
Preparation for such an event begins well before the event itself, said Joe Deters, director of storage and peaking for Nicor Gas. “In the summer, we’re putting gas in the ground, and we’re planning to get a certain inventory and a certain pressure in each reservoir so we can be assured it will perform as expected next winter,” he said. “You don’t always have a polar vortex like we did last year, but we are positioned and ready to deliver each and every year.”
For Ryan Dusek, Nicor Gas’ director of system operations, summer is also where winter’s successes are born. “All summer long, we’re installing improvements and replacing mains and facilities,” he said. “And each fall, we have a winter preparedness meeting that includes our gas control, supply, storage, engineering, systems ops, field operations, resources management and even our fleet department.”
At the end of the winter preparedness meeting, the utility conducts a drill simulating third-party damage or a natural disaster that leads to a hypothetical outage, testing its plans to ensure that employees and customers are safe and that gas service can be restored as quickly and as safely as possible.
Still, while a drill can simulate a lot, it can’t adequately mimic the epic weather that hit Nicor Gas’ Northern Illinois service area in January 2019.
“When we first started seeing the temperatures roll in, it was only forecast to be about a 66 heating degree day,” Deters said. “As it got closer, it was bumped to a 70, then a 71. Then, the day before, it was actually forecast to be an 82 heating degree day, and our system is designed with an estimate of the coldest day to be a 79 to 80 heating degree day.”
From an operational standpoint, however, Dusek was worried about more than just the cold.
“In this particular situation, it was a little more extreme because not only was it a cold drop over just a couple of days—from extreme to even more extreme—but there was also a snowstorm that was coming in at the beginning,” Dusek said. “That concerned us, because now we not only had to watch our critical facilities, but we had to dig ourselves out so we had access to them.”
Something particularly important, he said, is the work the engineering department does identifying areas of concern before they become a concern. “We know about these areas years in advance because we’re looking at them before the pressures become critical,” Dusek said.
Deters agreed. “I think a real shining star is that we have a significant infrastructure replacement program of updating and replacing a lot of our equipment,” he said. “We’ve been doing that since about 2014, and we saw some real benefits during the polar vortex.”
These improvements include the $1.25 billion investment Nicor Gas made to replace natural gas pipelines, move meters outside homes and businesses, and upgrade the natural gas storage systems.
For those who live in areas where the threat of severe weather is very real, preparation and response are part of the special balance that comes with living where they do.
“This is part of the fabric of our culture,” said CenterPoint Energy’s Greenley. “We know that it comes along with the service territory, but we’ve all chosen to be here because we love the communities we live in.”
While natural gas continues to provide safe and reliable energy even during the most destructive weather events, the events themselves provide the industry with opportunities to further fine-tune responses.
“People might call them a challenge or a negative thing, but they’re opportunities to learn,” said Nicor Gas’ Dusek. “They’re a gift to prepare yourself for the next event, and having those more frequently than less frequently allows us to be more prepared. Because if you go a long spell without extreme weather, you may not be as prepared for the next one.”
Energy Strong in New Jersey
Arguably, 2012’s Hurricane Sandy was one of the costliest natural disasters in recent U.S. history. For New Jersey’s PSE&G, that hurricane—along with other severe weather events that were responsible for nearly $71 billion in damages across the United States—led to the utility’s push for the $1.22 billion Energy Strong infrastructure investment program, which ran from 2014 to 2018, designed to increase the company’s gas and electric resiliency.
The program raised, relocated or otherwise protected 26 switching stations and substations damaged by Sandy or subsequent storms; replaced or modernized 240 miles of low-pressure cast-iron gas mains in or near flood areas; hardened five natural gas metering stations and three gas storage facilities that were either affected by Sandy or located in flood areas; and deployed smart technologies to allow for better monitoring and quicker response times.
An Energy Strong Phase 2 has been proposed. A pending settlement agreement would allocate an additional $842 million for redundancy and modernization.