Texas, 'He Is Lying. People Are Dying'

[NorthDallas40]

Daughter got in line for one and he told her he had 600 calls the first day.

wow figured it would be bad but wow. Sounds like a friend covered her that’s good. I’d guess he’s earned a bottle of his favorite whiskey

 

[BigOrangeTrain]

Solid AF

So the US is now a third world country? Wow thanks Biden.

 

[AM64]

Thanks. I now have an interest in all of this. Got a daughter and family (including a 2 year old granddaughter) in Houston who went 72 hours with no power. Fortunate to have been able to rotate with some families who had periodic power and water and only had one small pipe break which they shut down the first day with minimal damage and a buddy fixed it for them today. Could have been a whole lot worse.

We had quite a snowstorm several years ago - and lost power for a few days. My wife took one son and went to stay with friends; I said I was staying to take care of things and my older son said he was staying, too. We moved refrigerated and frozen stuff to the deck, had gas range for cooking, and gas logs in the den, so it went pretty well ... until the water went - that was a real pain. No power to the water company meant no water - that raises problems to a whole new level, we had stuff to drink and could melt and boil snow - there was certainly plenty of it - but still a real pain in the butt.

 

[W.TN.Orange Blood]

Wife was able to take her frustration out on 3 pallets of drums this morning putting that stretch wrap in there for me. And then she shut off the water to our house because we sprung a small leak in the piping inside the walls in the master bathroom. Even though we never lost power at our house. Good luck getting a plumber in Texas this month or next.

Good Lord .... getting a plumber in Texas to fix a water pipe after that disaster? You'll have to break open your 401K account to pay off the bill.

 

[evillawyer]

 

[AM64]

Wife was able to take her frustration out on 3 pallets of drums this morning putting that stretch wrap in there for me. And then she shut off the water to our house because we sprung a small leak in the piping inside the walls in the master bathroom. Even though we never lost power at our house. Good luck getting a plumber in Texas this month or next.

My brother in law has demonstrated a couple of times how to fix a problem with PEX pipe and SharkBite connectors. So far they've worked well - guess I'll know more with time, but no complaints so far and the repairs are fast.

 

[RavinDave]

Found it. This ties in what what some engineers were saying in a link I provided earlier as well as an opinion piece I posted.

I don’t know if we actually need to add natural gas capacity or insure the natural gas capacity plus reserves have a hardened fuel delivery system. What I’ve read thus far implies the latter but it could really be a mix of both. Some of the engineers in the national review article seemed to indicate that.

https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/82R/billtext/pdf/HB01986I.pdf#navpanes=0

One of the interesting facts that I learned from the NR article is that a lot of the compression equipment necessary to push natural gas from wellheads up to pipeline pressure (typically 500 to 800 psig) and move it through the system is now run by electric motors instead of natural-gas-fired IC engines... talk about eating your own. So this just compounded the problem. Kind of hard to keep natural gas flowing to the power plants that need it, when you need electricity to run those compressors and can't get it!

As an aside - I saw some posts yesterday talking about NG pipelines "freezing" and this had me a little bit puzzled because the main arteries of the NG distribution system - the big pipelines that connect the producing areas with consumers across the state and the nation - require the gas be dry before they accept it, in most cases having to meet a spec of "max. 7 lbs of moisture per million standard cubic feet of gas" which is equivalent to around 20 ppm of moisture...

It was mentioned in the NR article that freezing problems were occurring at the wellhead, which does make sense, as the NG is wet coming out of the ground but gets dried out in "midstream processing plants" where the heavier HCs are condensed and sold as the more valuable liquid fractions (propane, butane etc.) while the lighter fraction which is mostly methane (and a little ethane) gets dried in the process of becoming "sales gas" before being fed into the distribution system. So in effect it was the midstream processors not being able to get their normal volume of raw gas from the wellheads/producing areas that led to the supply pinch that forced a lot of NG-fired power producers offline during the crisis.

 

[RavinDave]

Good Lord .... getting a plumber in Texas to fix a water pipe after that disaster? You'll have to break open your 401K account to pay off the bill.

I'm actually a pretty fair hand when it comes to piping. My old friend and mentor (RIP) used to joke that a chemical engineer is just an "overeducated plumber". But nowadays I'm so busy just running the business that I am only too happy to hire help to do the things I used to do my own self. As a consequence, my wife has become "the man around the house" too. When we first got married she didn't know which end of a screwdriver was the business end, but nowadays she does more maintenance around the house than I do... she's actually pretty good at watching YouTube videos about how to do stuff like sheetrock repair etc.

 

[NorthDallas40]

One of the interesting facts that I learned from the NR article is that a lot of the compression equipment necessary to push natural gas from wellheads up to pipeline pressure (typically 500 to 800 psig) and move it through the system is now run by electric motors instead of natural-gas-fired IC engines... talk about eating your own. So this just compounded the problem. Kind of hard to keep natural gas flowing to the power plants that need it, when you need electricity to run those compressors and can't get it!

As an aside - I saw some posts yesterday talking about NG pipelines "freezing" and this had me a little bit puzzled because the main arteries of the NG distribution system - the big pipelines that connect the producing areas with consumers across the state and the nation - require the gas be dry before they accept it, in most cases having to meet a spec of "max. 7 lbs of moisture per million standard cubic feet of gas" which is equivalent to around 20 ppm of moisture...

It was mentioned in the NR article that freezing problems were occurring at the wellhead, which does make sense, as the NG is wet coming out of the ground but gets dried out in "midstream processing plants" where the heavier HCs are condensed and sold as the more valuable liquid fractions (propane, butane etc.) while the lighter fraction which is mostly methane (and a little ethane) gets dried in the process of becoming "sales gas" before being fed into the distribution system. So in effect it was the midstream processors not being able to get their normal volume of raw gas from the wellheads/producing areas that led to the supply pinch that forced a lot of NG-fired power producers offline during the crisis.

Yeah I saw the gas equipment change out too. Idiots

I assumed the gas in the large distribution lines had to be dried to a certain level if for no other reason than pipeline corrosion. No idea what the equivalent dew point would be for that mixture but I would expect it to be below 0F.

There are various pipeline access points in the network that pop above ground and I was wondering if that was a problem point. But if the gas mixture is “dry”...

Yes I read in multiple places that a huge number of well heads had frozen up. And again in a lot of cases this is private party equipment. I hunted on a 4-6 section ranch (1 section = 1 sq mi) regularly that ran cattle and had gas wellheads, piping, and local storage all out in the open. The gas coming up has to be very “wet” since the deep temperatures are very hot.

 

[NorthDallas40]

I'm actually a pretty fair hand when it comes to piping. My old friend and mentor (RIP) used to joke that a chemical engineer is just an "overeducated plumber". But nowadays I'm so busy just running the business that I am only too happy to hire help to do the things I used to do my own self. As a consequence, my wife has become "the man around the house" too. When we first got married she didn't know which end of a screwdriver was the business end, but nowadays she does more maintenance around the house than I do... she's actually pretty good at watching YouTube videos about how to do stuff like sheetrock repair etc.

I do a lot of plumbing myself too. If we had an issue depending on where it was I might try to tackle it. But I don’t have any PEX crimpers or other tools. Would defer to a plumber on PEX repair but I could at least open to up and isolate it so it would be a quick repair.

 

[NorthDallas40]

One of the interesting facts that I learned from the NR article is that a lot of the compression equipment necessary to push natural gas from wellheads up to pipeline pressure (typically 500 to 800 psig) and move it through the system is now run by electric motors instead of natural-gas-fired IC engines... talk about eating your own. So this just compounded the problem. Kind of hard to keep natural gas flowing to the power plants that need it, when you need electricity to run those compressors and can't get it!

As an aside - I saw some posts yesterday talking about NG pipelines "freezing" and this had me a little bit puzzled because the main arteries of the NG distribution system - the big pipelines that connect the producing areas with consumers across the state and the nation - require the gas be dry before they accept it, in most cases having to meet a spec of "max. 7 lbs of moisture per million standard cubic feet of gas" which is equivalent to around 20 ppm of moisture...

It was mentioned in the NR article that freezing problems were occurring at the wellhead, which does make sense, as the NG is wet coming out of the ground but gets dried out in "midstream processing plants" where the heavier HCs are condensed and sold as the more valuable liquid fractions (propane, butane etc.) while the lighter fraction which is mostly methane (and a little ethane) gets dried in the process of becoming "sales gas" before being fed into the distribution system. So in effect it was the midstream processors not being able to get their normal volume of raw gas from the wellheads/producing areas that led to the supply pinch that forced a lot of NG-fired power producers offline during the crisis.

Oh. And Abbott decreed that if anybody got pinched on gas availability it was non residential customers. He stated that ATMOS was to Service residential first. Not really sure if that helped or hurt honestly. It clearly did help us.

 

[DC_Vol]

Maybe we can get Bill Gates to pay? After all he lives in a 60,000 square foot house and he travels in a private jet. The next 10 generations of his progeny will pollute as much as all of the members of Volnation combined will.

He probably won’t pay. But he’ll probably be happy to tell us how power grids ought to be

 

[RavinDave]

Yeah I saw the gas equipment change out too. Idiots

I assumed the gas in the large distribution lines had to be dried to a certain level if for no other reason than pipeline corrosion. No idea what the equivalent dew point would be for that mixture but I would expect it to be below 0F.

There are various pipeline access points in the network that pop above ground and I was wondering if that was a problem point. But if the gas mixture is “dry”...

Yes I read in multiple places that a huge number of well heads had frozen up. And again in a lot of cases this is private party equipment. I hunted on a 4-6 section ranch (1 section = 1 sq mi) regularly that ran cattle and had gas wellheads, piping, and local storage all out in the open. The gas coming up has to be very “wet” since the deep temperatures are very hot.

Right, dew points in the distribution system are going to be extremely low, like -40 or below (course, the higher the pressure the less moisture you have at saturation at a given temperature too). Two reasons moisture levels need to be low: (1) corrosion, as you correctly pointed out, and (2) it don't burn (sales gas has to meet a BTU spec too).

 

[NorthDallas40]

Right, dew points in the distribution system are going to be extremely low, like -40 or below (course, the higher the pressure the less moisture you have at saturation at a given temperature too). Two reasons moisture levels need to be low: (1) corrosion, as you correctly pointed out, and (2) it don't burn (sales gas has to meet a BTU spec too).

I don’t know why the gas plants don’t have local emergency LNG storage. I wonder if this event will pass a pain threshold which would make it economically feasible.

I don’t see how you solve the wellhead problem. You tell a bunch of ranchers or their production subcontractors you need to now put this extra equipment on all your wellheads and collection tanks. They will say piss off. And the big corporate producers will just pass that cost on to the consumer ... as usual.

 

[RavinDave]

I don’t know why the gas plants don’t have local emergency LNG storage. I wonder if this event will pass a pain threshold which would make it economically feasible.

I don’t see how you solve the wellhead problem. You tell a bunch of ranchers or their production subcontractors you need to now put this extra equipment on all your wellheads and collection tanks. They will say piss off. And the big corporate producers will just pass that cost on to the consumer ... as usual.

It would make more sense for the power plants to have some LNG storage - except converting NG into LNG itself in the first place is a rather complex cryogenic process and is generally done only on a very large scale e.g. at export terminals where they load big ships with it.

As for the wellhead freezing issue, I don't think it would take a lot of time or money to prevent that. It's only a matter of installing some additional insulation and/or steam tracing or electrical tracing, to keep from forming ice inside of lines and vessels where water is generally present in liquid form already... something they already do in places like the Panhandle where it gets well below freezing regularly every winter...

 

[Vol737]

AOC says problems with Texas infrastructure is what you get when you don’t pursue the “Green New Deal”. Hahaha. Now get back behind the bar and pour me a bourbon.

 

[NorthDallas40]

It would make more sense for the power plants to have some LNG storage - except converting NG into LNG itself in the first place is a rather complex cryogenic process and is generally done only on a very large scale e.g. at export terminals where they load big ships with it.

As for the wellhead freezing issue, I don't think it would take a lot of time or money to prevent that. It's only a matter of installing some additional insulation and/or steam tracing or electrical tracing, to keep from forming ice inside of lines and vessels where water is generally present in liquid form already... something they already do in places like the Panhandle where it gets well below freezing regularly every winter...

Yep I had assumed that the liquefaction would have to occur off site and then the LNG would have to be transported to some reserve tanks on site. But in liquid form you can store a crap ton of gas. As you said that’s how the tankers transport it. Will be interested to see if they consider either any local plant storage or maybe distribution point storage? Phase transition back to gas then just put it into the pipes as usual? I’m way out of my element here admittedly.

Man those coal plants we deactivated in recent years...

 

[RavinDave]

Yep I had assumed that the liquefaction would have to occur off site and then the LNG would have to be transported to some reserve tanks on site. But in liquid form you can store a crap ton of gas. As you said that’s how the tankers transport it. Will be interested to see if they consider either any local plant storage or maybe distribution point storage? Phase transition back to gas then just put it into the pipes as usual? I’m way out of my element here admittedly.

Man those coal plants we deactivated in recent years...

Liquid nitrogen is distributed in everything from tank trucks to small thermos type containers, so it's not that much of a stretch to think LNG storage at a power plant wouldn't be a good idea and could be safely done. With that type of storage - unless you have cryogenic refrigeration on the storage tank to keep it from building up pressure you have to have a certain boil-off rate that essentially removes the heat that it picks up through the walls of the tank, but this could be managed... primarily by letting some vapor off into the intake of the turbine generators. In my first job out of college I worked in a large petrochemical plant where we had liquid storage of a cryogenic volatile product, vinyl chloride monomer, which at the time had just come under increasing regulation as a carcinogen (linked to liver cancer)... I was the computer control guy in a new VCM unit through start-up, and we had 3 or 4 huge, double-walled spherical tanks we stored product in, right on the banks of the Mississippi River, for loading ships and barges (a few miles up from New Orleans). It ain't really rocket science.

 

[WBO]

That's absurd. The argument that wind is not to blame is that out of the 30 GW capacity, ERCOT was only counting on 4 GW. And since it provided about 4 GW, then it can't be to blame. i.e. reliably unreliable. If you stack a lineup with .200 hitters, and then lose. You can't say you didn't lose because of the 0.200 hitters because nobody expected them to hit. Yes, you did because they suck and you can't rely on them. They never should have spent money on wind that's a throwaway power source. They should have invested that in more firm resources like nuclear or their gas supply lines. Did they lose nuclear capacity, yes. But nuclear is still running through this at an 80% capacity compared to the 15% of wind.

I've seen this from multiple energy experts. The people whose policy we will he following. I have no faith in experts when it's blatant propoganda.

Did any of your energy experts looks like Alfred E. Newman?

The problem was in failure to winterize across the board. Texas gets the biggest portion of its electricity from natural gas. Almost all of the natural gas pipelines nationally "dehumidify" the pipelines, but the independent Texas grid producers do not (it's expensive). In severe cold like the past week, pipelines that do not dehumidify freeze up. That was the biggest portion of lost production.

And before you try to blame wind further, they have full year round windmills in Minnesota and North Dakota and they don't freeze up because they are engineered to operate in those temperatures.

Governor Abbott retracted his statement on Hannity where he blamed wind power. His spokesman admitted that was not correct.

 

[RavinDave]

AOC says problems with Texas infrastructure is what you get when you don’t pursue the “Green New Deal”. Hahaha. Now get back behind the bar and pour me a bourbon.

Make that a double!

 

[NorthDallas40]

Liquid nitrogen is distributed in everything from tank trucks to small thermos type containers, so it's not that much of a stretch to think LNG storage at a power plant wouldn't be a good idea and could be safely done. With that type of storage - unless you have cryogenic refrigeration on the storage tank to keep it from building up pressure you have to have a certain boil-off rate that essentially removes the heat that it picks up through the walls of the tank, but this could be managed... primarily by letting some vapor off into the intake of the turbine generators. In my first job out of college I worked in a large petrochemical plant where we had liquid storage of a cryogenic volatile product, vinyl chloride monomer, which at the time had just come under increasing regulation as a carcinogen (linked to liver cancer)... I was the computer control guy in a new VCM unit through start-up, and we had 3 or 4 huge, double-walled spherical tanks we stored product in, right on the banks of the Mississippi River, for loading ships and barges (a few miles up from New Orleans). It ain't really rocket science.

So I read somewhere that we basically delivered an entire months energy level in four days or so. I’d guess there is some simple first order math that could be done to see how many LNG tanks could be added to the main distribution pipelines and as you said just let it bleed off as required to maintain safe pressures. And we knew close to three weeks ahead of time this was coming. Plenty of time to top off the LNG tanks I think. To your point the distribution gas have to be kept very dry for burning as well as corrosion so if that holds up and the delivery piping wasn’t the issue then it would seem like that could feed the distribution network.

 

[SpaceCoastVol]

Every Texas plumber in two weeks.
View attachment 353276

I'd love to see that plumber walk into a Starbucks and get his Latte from the tatted up PhD behind the counter. LOL

 

[RavinDave]

So I read somewhere that we basically delivered an entire months energy level in four days or so. I’d guess there is some simple first order math that could be done to see how many LNG tanks could be added to the main distribution pipelines and as you said just let it bleed off as required to maintain safe pressures. And we knew close to three weeks ahead of time this was coming. Plenty of time to top off the LNG tanks I think. To your point the distribution gas have to be kept very dry for burning as well as corrosion so if that holds up and the delivery piping wasn’t the issue then it would seem like that could feed the distribution network.

Just as a ballpark number, LNG has about 10x the energy density (i.e. BTU per ft3 of storage tank) compared to methane at 500 psig. LNG as an emergency reserve for power plants does make some sense.

 

[NorthDallas40]

Just as a ballpark number, LNG has about 10x the energy density (i.e. BTU per ft3 of storage tank) compared to methane at 500 psig. LNG as an emergency reserve for power plants does make some sense.

I’m assuming the methane at the plant side is low pressure delivery also? I know residential delivery is specified in In-H20 since it is such low pressure. Just a handful of psi.

Edit: ok from reading the large distribution in the mains is still around 200 psi. It continues to step down until it’s 2-10 psi at the house gas meter.

 

[Rasputin_Vol]

Another good read. From engineers. Not frigging politicians or “journalists”

Texas Electricity Crisis: Engineers Explain What Went Wrong | National Review

It’s likely the same kinds of failures are behind much of Texas’s recent trouble. It’s also likely that there was a kind of vicious cycle at play: In an effort to improve their environmental profiles, oil and gas operators have spent years replacing gas-driven compressors and other parts with electric equipment. Without electricity, that equipment fails and the gas stops flowing to the electrical plants, reducing their ability to keep up with demand elsewhere. Blackouts can cause more blackouts by taking electrical plants’ fuel-delivery systems offline.