Texas Power Outages: Why Natural Gas Dropped During the Winter Storm

Disruptions to Texas natural gas operations and supply chains due to extreme temperatures are the main cause of the power crisis that left millions of Texans without heat and electricity during the winter storm that engulfed the US.

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

Officials from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, which operates most of Texas’ power grid, said the main cause of the outage on Tuesday 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 natural gas production in the state has stalled due to the extremely low temperatures, while frozen components at natural gas-fired power plants have forced some operators to close their doors.

“Texas is a gas state,” said Michael Webber, a professor of energy resources at the University of Texas at Austin. While he said all of Texas’s energy resources are to blame for the power crisis at least one nuclear power plant has been partially shut down, in particular the natural gas industry produces significantly less electricity than normal.

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

According to Dan Woodfin, a senior executive at ERCOT, more than half of ERCOT’s winter generation capacity, largely powered by natural gas, was offline due to the storm, an estimated 45 gigawatts.

The outage during this storm was much greater than what ERCOT had predicted for an extreme winter event in November. Peak demand forecast was 67 gigawatts; Peak consumption during the storm was more than 69 gigawatts on Sunday.

It is estimated that about 80% of the grid’s capacity, or 67 gigawatts, can be generated by natural gas, coal and some nuclear energy. Only 7% of ERCOT’s predicted winter capacity, or six gigawatts, would come from various wind energy sources in the state.

Woodfin said Tuesday that 16 gigawatts of renewable energy generation, mainly wind, is offline and 30 gigawatts of thermal sources, including gas, coal and nuclear, are offline.

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

Natural gas production in the state has declined, making it difficult for power plants to get the fuel needed to run the plants. Natural gas plants don’t usually have much on-site fuel storage, experts said. Instead, the factories rely on the constant flow of natural gas from pipelines running across the state from areas like the Perm Basin in West Texas to major demand centers like Houston and Dallas.

In early February, operators in Texas were producing about 24 billion cubic feet per day, according to an estimate by S&P Global Platts. But on Monday, production in Texas plummeted to a fraction of that: Operators in the state were producing somewhere between 12 and 17 billion cubic feet per day.

The systems that draw gas from the earth are not well built for cold weather. Operators in West Texas’s Perm Basin, 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 fuel fossil fuel prevent fuels. from the ground.

“Manifolds freeze, and the wells get so cold they can’t produce,” said Parker Fawcett, a natural gas analyst at S&P Global Platts. “And pumps use electricity, so they’re not even able to lift that gas and that liquid, because there’s no power 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 – most of the time.

The sources of the storage that the state does have are somewhat difficult to reach. Luke Jackson, another natural gas analyst for S&P Global Platts, said the physical withdrawal of stored natural gas is slower than the immediate, easy supply of lines from production and insufficient to offset the dramatic declines in production.

Some power plants were already offline before the crisis started, adding to the problems, experts said. ERCOT provided four gigawatts of maintenance outages in the winter. Texas power plants usually maintain and update their plants during the typically mild winter months in preparation for the extreme demands for electricity and power during the summer. That also puts a burden on the network’s supply.

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

“You don’t have that much direct combustion of natural gas in the summer,” said Daniel Cohan, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University, pointing out that during peak usage during the summer months, demand is everything. for electricity.

The last time the state went through such a major freeze was a decade ago in 2011. Natural gas production then had problems too – had ERCOT not reduced the load due to the rolling power outages during that storm, it would have resulted in power outages throughout region, a federal report warned about the storm.

It’s possible to “ winterize ” natural gas power plants, natural gas production and wind turbines, said experts, avoiding such large outages in other states with more regular extreme winter weather. But even after upgrades were made after the 2011 winter storm, many Texas power generators still haven’t made all the investments necessary to avoid the kind of equipment disruptions, experts said.

ERCOT executives also said the storm took a turn for the worse this week in the early morning hours of Monday, when extremely cold temperatures forced many more generators offline than ERCOT had expected.

“It seemed like the winterization we were doing was working, but this weather was more extreme than (storms in the past),” Woodfin said. “The loss of generation on Monday morning, after midnight, was really the part that made this a more extreme event than we had planned.”

Upgrading equipment to withstand extremely cold temperatures and other changes, such as encouraging customers to conserve power or upgrade to smart devices, can help prevent disasters like this one, said Le Xie, a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas. A&M University and Deputy Director of Energy Digitization at A & M’s Energy Institute.

“We used to not worry too much about such extremely cold weather in places like Texas, but we probably need to prepare for more in the future,” said Xie. With climate change, he said, “We’re going to have more extreme weather events across the country.”

– Jolie McCullough contributed to reporting.

Disclosure: Rice University, Texas A&M University, and University of Texas at Austin have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a non-profit, unbiased news organization funded in part by donations from members, foundations, and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no part in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a full list here.