Texas Power Outage: Why Natural Gas Drops During the Winter Storm

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

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

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

According to some estimates, almost half of the state’s natural gas production has stopped due to extremely low temperatures, while frozen components at natural gas-fired power plants have forced some operators to shut down.

“Texas is a gas state,” said Michael Webber, a professor of energy at the University of Texas at Austin. While he said that all energy sources in Texas share the blame for the energy crisis – at least one nuclear power plant has been partially shut down, especially – the natural gas industry produces significantly less energy than normal.

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

More than half of ERCOT’s winter-generating capacity, mostly powered by natural gas, was offline due to the storm, about 45 gigawatts, according to Dan Woodfin, senior director at ERCOT.

The outages during this storm far exceeded what ERCOT had predicted in November for an extremely winter event. The forecast for peak demand was 67 gigawatts; Maximum use during the storm was higher than 69 gigawatts on Sunday.

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

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

“It seems that much of the generation that went offline today was primarily due to issues with the gas system,” Woodfin said during a call Tuesday with reporters.

Natural gas production in the state has decreased, which makes it difficult to obtain the fuel needed for the operation of power plants. Natural gas power plants do not usually have much fuel storage on site, experts said. Instead, the plants rely on the constant flow of natural gas from pipelines across the state in areas such as the Permian Basin in West Texas to major demand centers such as Houston and Dallas.

In early February, Texas operators were producing about 24 billion cubic meters a day, according to an estimate by S&P Global Platts. On Monday, production in Texas fell to a fraction of that: state operators produced somewhere between 12 and 17 billion cubic meters a day.

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

“The collection lines are freezing and the wells are getting so cold they can’t produce,” said Parker Fawcett, a gas analyst for S&P Global Platts. “And the pumps use electricity, so they’re not even able to lift that gas and liquid, because there’s no product energy.”

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 – usually.

From the storage that the state has, the 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 ready supply of production lines and is insufficient to offset the dramatic declines in production.

Some power plants were already offline before the crisis began, adding to the problems, experts said. ERCOT anticipated four gigawatts of maintenance outages during the winter. Texas power plants typically perform maintenance and upgrades on their plants in the usually mild winter months to prepare for extreme demand for electricity and energy during the summer. And that strains the network supply.

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, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University, noting that during peak summer months, demand is for electricity.

The last time the state suffered a major freeze like this was a decade ago in 2011. And at that time, natural gas generation ran into difficulties – if ERCOT did not reduce the burden through the interruptions implemented during that storm, would have resulted in disruptions throughout the region, a federal storm report warned.

It is possible to “winterize” natural gas power plants, natural gas production and wind turbines, experts said, which prevent such major outages in other states with more regular winter weather. But even after upgrades following the 2011 winter storm, many power generators in Texas have not yet made all the necessary investments to prevent some kind of equipment outages, experts said.

ERCOT executives also said that this week’s storm took a turn in the early hours of Monday morning, when extremely low temperatures forced more generators offline than ERCOT had anticipated.

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

Upgrading equipment to withstand extremely low temperatures and other changes, such as providing customers with incentives to save energy or upgrade smart devices, could help prevent disasters like this, said Le Xie, a professor. of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas A&M and Deputy Director of Energy Digitization at A & M’s Energy Institute.

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

– Jolie McCullough contributed to the reporting.

Disclosure: Rice University, Texas A&M University and the University of Texas at Austin were the financial backers of The Texas Tribune, a non-partisan, nonprofit news organization funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial backers play no role in Tribune journalism. Find a complete list of them here.