ERCOT, PUC, and deregulation got us here

[PenelopeWitherspoon 19,094]

1 minute ago, Neonmoon said:

You know the whole “we are energy independent” Trumpers. That’s not really true. In the sense we produce that much, but these are private companies that sell to the highest bidder. They don’t make sure all our energy is supplied by US and then export the rest. We still import 50% of our energy from Middle East and South America. 

I would argue that energy independence doesn't mean we produce all that we use, but that energy independence would mean that our sources are diverse enough to not be massively impacted from a supply perspective (we will also be subject to price impact due to market forces) by some sort of event.   

[High Plains Drifter 10,981]

42 minutes ago, PenelopeWitherspoon said:

Also, when natural gas production goes down, and there is a massive demand on natural gas, there is just no fuel.  Power plants do not store gas on site.  They require delivery into their system.  When that goes down, when pipes are congested, yeah, shit breaks.  This was LITERALLY the perfect storm where EVERYTHING went bad.

 

Serious question: why the fuck not? Safety issues? Costs too much?

[PenelopeWitherspoon 19,094]

Just now, High Plains Drifter said:

 

 

 I was driving around just now, listening to NPR, and they called out Abbot for his bullshit. I believe the direct quote was something like "Governor Abbot falsely claimed renewable energy was the cause of the power outages in Texas."

 

Sidenote: The reason I was driving around was because the local federally subsidized apartment housing complex for the elderly and disabled doesn't have power. One of the tenants is a client of my wife. She called my wife and my wife found out her client was freezing in her crappy little apartment. My wife called the managers, who said there was nothing they could do, then she called the local police, who said there was nothing they could do but there was a "warming shelter" set up in the county fire house, so it fell to me to go pick up my wife's client and drive her to the warming shelter. When I got there, I learned that there were probably 20 additional old people who needed rides.

By that time, my wife had called a few other people, so between the three of us, we got them all to the shelter in about an hour. After that I went to fill up on gas, and there were lines of cars at the gas station. I don't know if that is because of stupid people panicking, or because all the other gas stations not having power, or what.

 

And so it goes. Its the end times, fellas.

Good on you and your wife for being good people.  

Also, anytime there is an issue, Texans go line up for gas, though this time, people may be hanging out in their cars to stay warm.

[PenelopeWitherspoon 19,094]

Just now, High Plains Drifter said:

 

Serious question: why the fuck not? Safety issues? Costs too much?

Because natural gas is generally stored underground in old aquifers, salt caverns, old mines, etc... and those are not always where a power plant is.  Also, it is very expensive.  

https://www.eia.gov/naturalgas/storage/basics/

[PenelopeWitherspoon 19,094]

More on the oil and gas production issues.  Force majeure has been declared.  

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-17/texas-s-power-crisis-isn-t-getting-better-it-s-getting-worse?srnd=premium&sref=knoriXqz

[YChang 3,432]

Look at Abbott "clarifying" how he called out every source of energy generation has been compromised. Lol, qualifying that he only suggested if Texas relied only on green energy the state would be in trouble. Asshole... did that on local TV stations/radio. Way to not do that on FOX. 

Edited February 17, 2021 by YChang

[WBT 20,425]

Abbot crawfishing in his press conference, admitting that all sources of power generation have had failures.  He already got his sound bite out there I guess.

[YChang 3,432]

This is what's so frustrating about Abbott. He's not stupid or ignorant.... he chooses to pander to assholes and Trump base of the GOP. 

[HenryJames 65,891]

 

[gmr548 16,520]

Look at Abbott "clarifying" how he called out every source of energy generation has been compromised. Lol, qualifying that he only suggested if Texas relied only on green energy the state would be in trouble. Asshole... did that on local TV stations/radio. Way to not do that on FOX. 

Abbot crawfishing in his press conference, admitting that all sources of power generation have had failures.  He already got his sound bite out there I guess.

Yep. No one watching FOX will ever leave the bubble and suburban moderates will simply forgive him because he clarified.

[PenelopeWitherspoon 19,094]

So, a friend of mine who is a former gas trader and started Real Simple Energy.   From his company:

 

“ERCOT cannot seem to get above 50,000 MW of generation. During peak demand times (mornings and evenings) over the next few days, the total Texas demand would be around 65,000 MW if everyone had power. This means there is an increased chance you get power during low demand periods like 10pm-5am and 12pm-4pm....but then it may go off during those high demand periods again.

 

Natural gas power plants, which power much of the Texas grid, receive natural gas deliveries to them daily via pipelines. Since this past weekend, they have struggled to get fuel (largely because of natural gas well freeze-offs) and we don't see much reason for this to change over the next few days. If they don't have fuel they cannot run.

 

Even power plants that have fuel struggle to run at maximum capacity for days-on-end. Many plants are just not made for it and when pushed too hard, they break, and that is what we have seen here. Repair of those plants takes time.

 

Wholesale power price futures for the next 5 days, traded by market participants with a lot more knowledge than us, are indicating this grid-wide stress continues through the weekend.”

[ndawg 1,242]

4 minutes ago, PenelopeWitherspoon said:

So, a friend of mine who is a former gas trader and started Real Simple Energy.   From his company:

 

“ERCOT cannot seem to get above 50,000 MW of generation. During peak demand times (mornings and evenings) over the next few days, the total Texas demand would be around 65,000 MW if everyone had power. This means there is an increased chance you get power during low demand periods like 10pm-5am and 12pm-4pm....but then it may go off during those high demand periods again.

 

Natural gas power plants, which power much of the Texas grid, receive natural gas deliveries to them daily via pipelines. Since this past weekend, they have struggled to get fuel (largely because of natural gas well freeze-offs) and we don't see much reason for this to change over the next few days. If they don't have fuel they cannot run.

 

Even power plants that have fuel struggle to run at maximum capacity for days-on-end. Many plants are just not made for it and when pushed too hard, they break, and that is what we have seen here. Repair of those plants takes time.

 

Wholesale power price futures for the next 5 days, traded by market participants with a lot more knowledge than us, are indicating this grid-wide stress continues through the weekend.”

Is ERCOT lying on their homepage? The chart on the left says they have 54,000 MW of capacity. (Source: http://www.ercot.com/)

[gmr548 16,520]

 
 
They were doing that?

Profits > people.

[PenelopeWitherspoon 19,094]

4 minutes ago, ndawg said:

Is ERCOT lying on their homepage? The chart on the left says they have 54,000 MW of capacity. (Source: http://www.ercot.com/)

That might have been from earlier today (I did not check the time stamp), but I thought it was a good explanation for the crap going on (summarizes what many of us have been saying in this thread quite nicely).  

[ndawg 1,242]

1 minute ago, PenelopeWitherspoon said:

That might have been from earlier today (I did not check the time stamp), but I thought it was a good explanation for the crap going on (summarizes what many of us have been saying in this thread quite nicely).  

Yeah, I definitely appreciate it. Just wanted to square that discrepancy.

[MC Fresh Breath 4,074]

 

[Bateshorn 9,908]

I’m get to let you in on a little secret: I pay a little extra to PEPCO each  month to do things like line maintenance and plant upgrades and modernization. It’s cool cause when I lose power,  it’s usually for 12-18 hours max.  Unless we have a hurricane, then maybe 2-3 days. 

[Francisco 2.0 32,346]

https://www.thedailybeast.com/dollar5152-power-bill-texas-winter-storm-hell-only-gets-worse?ref=home?ref=home

 

Quote

As a historic winter storm raged across Texas over the weekend, Akilah Scott-Amos received an alarming message from her power company: Please switch services because “prices are about to explode.”

The 43-year-old owner of an organic skincare and apothecary shop was initially confused by the message from Griddy, which sells wholesale power for a monthly membership, but she began to look for other providers.

 

Quote

Then she checked her bill.

“I paid $450 for one day. I was in shock,” Scott-Amos told The Daily Beast on Wednesday. “It made no sense because we have a gas heater, a gas fireplace, and we have been keeping the temperature around the house at 65 degrees. With that amount of money, and the labeled amount of usage Griddy said was used—we would have to be lighting up the whole neighborhood.”

 

 

Quote

The nightmare only got worse on Monday, when she realized her bill had increased by another $2,500. In comparison, Scott-Amos paid $33.93 last year for the entire month of February.

“I don’t have that type of money,” she said. “I now owe Griddy $2,869.11. This is going to put me in debt, this is going to mess up my credit. Are they going to cut me off? In the middle of this ongoing crisis?”

 

Spoiler

Scott-Amos is not alone. Dozens of Griddy customers have blasted the wholesale power company for their outrageously high bills amid a winter disaster.

Despite the astronomical prices, Scott-Amos is considered one of the lucky ones, as millions of people across Texas are still without power while temperatures remain perilously low. The storm, which bulldozed through parts of the central and southern United States this week, has killed at least 30 people and hospitalized dozens more who have resorted to dangerous measures to stay warm.

“This is a double-edged sword,” Scott-Amos said. “Thankfully we have power, but at what price? We are using it minimally and getting charged thousands. Most people I know don’t even have power, and I’m getting these outrageous bills.”

While power outages have affected Americans across the country, from West Virginia to Oregon, Texas has been hit the hardest. On Tuesday, at least 4.3 million Texans were left in the dark. According to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which manages the state’s power grid, only 700,000 homes had their electricity restored overnight. More than 2.7 million customers still don’t have power.

“We know millions of people are suffering,” ERCOT President and CEO Bill Magness said in a Wednesday statement. “We have no other priority than getting them electricity. No other priority.”

But data from ERCOT suggests the price of getting the lights back on might be too steep for some Texans. As first reported by Reuters, the market prices on the power grid spiked more than 10,000 percent on Monday in the aftermath of the deep freeze. Prices skyrocketed to more than $9,000 per megawatt-hour—compared to the pre-storm prices of less than $50 per hour.

The amped-up wattage costs have affected Griddy customers in particular because of the company’s distinctive business model. In Texas’ hypercharged market for electricity, Griddy makes money by debiting its subscribers a flat $9.99 monthly fee—and then selling them raw power at its going wholesale value, effectively stripping out any insulation between consumers and the oscillations in supply and demand.

Often this saves Griddy customers money. But the wild surge in costs due to failures across ERCOT’s grid has juiced bills up to astounding levels. Griddy initially urged its customers to switch to another power provider, but few companies are accepting new accounts.

Exacerbating and prolonging this sticker shock is a decision on Tuesday by the state’s Power Utility Commission, which regulates the nonprofit ERCOT’s operations. The order from the gubernatorially appointed PUC asserted that, even with a hike coinciding with cold weather and increased heating use, ERCOT had been undercharging consumers for the cost of energy and directed it to raise its rates.

“We made the unprecedented decision to tell our customers—whom we worked really hard to get—that they are better off in the near term with another provider,” Michael Fallquist, chief executive officer of Griddy, previously said in a statement. “We want what’s right by our consumers, so we are encouraging them to leave.”

Royce Pierce, a 38-year-old contractor, is one of those Griddy customers who received a notice from the power company to abandon his service—a message he admitted to The Daily Beast he thought was “overly precautionary” as the winter storm loomed.

Now, his bill has skyrocketed over $7,000 in the last two days, he said. As of Wednesday, Pierce owes Griddy $8,162.73 for the month of February—a shocking price considering the bill for his two-story house was $387.70 just last month. Last February, Pierce said he only paid $330.

“It’s mindblowing. I honestly didn’t believe the price at first,” Pierce said on Wednesday. “It’s not a great feeling knowing that there is a looming bill that we just can’t afford.”

Like Scott-Amos, Pierce said his family has been trying to use as little electricity as possible to keep down the insane costs, including turning down the thermostat to 50 degrees and not using the lights or oven.

“I am walking around in my bathrobe right now to keep warm,” he added with a laugh. Stressing that he is hoping for a relief package from the state to help with the bill, Pierce said he is just living under the assumption “this is a later problem.”

“I just told my wife to stop checking. There is nothing we can do now. This is already an insane thing and I don’t care about the money when it comes to people’s health,” he said, adding that if his work had not been affected by COVID-19 and he was working full-time “we could have taken care of this.”

Griddy and ERCOT did not immediately respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment.

Texas officials have declared a state of emergency and the Lone Star state was hit with another arctic blast on Wednesday in what the National Weather Service has called “the worst of all the winter events over the past week.”

With the possibility that this winter disaster is far from over, Scott-Amos is worried that the price spikes might prompt some Texans to shut off their power—or take dangerous measures to keep warm.

“It’s like people who don’t go to the doctor or dentist because they don’t want to pay. People are desperate and you shouldn’t have to choose,” she said.

Dr. Sam Prater, a UTHealth emergency medicine physician with Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center, told The Daily Beast his Houston hospital had already seen at least 100 patients come in over 48 hours with carbon monoxide poisoning.

“This increase in cases of carbon monoxide poisoning is a mass casualty event and part of the larger public health disaster that Houston is currently facing,” he said.

Some residents have attempted to use their BBQ pits, campfire grills, or stovetops inside their homes to stay warm. Several people have died, including a Sharpstown woman and an 8-year-old girl who suffered suspected carbon monoxide poisoning after running their car in the garage to generate heat.

“This is a public health emergency. We have seen both adults and children in our emergency rooms for carbon monoxide poisoning as people without power do anything they can to keep their families warm during this arctic blast that has plagued the Houston area,” Prater added, stressing that residents should bundle up in layers and only warm-up in their cars outside of the garage.

Scott-Amos is outraged this public health emergency has been exacerbated by the “greed” of electrical companies.

“I think people are greedy. It doesn’t make sense,” she said. “I am dumbfounded. There is no compassion or grace for people.”

 

[BehoId, The Underminer! 11,668]

25 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

“Thankfully we have power, but at what price?

 

25 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

“I paid $450 for one day.

 

[Bateshorn 9,908]

Adam Smith can be a real motherfucker. 

[Hugo Stiglitz 23,363]

Getting fisted by the invisible hand!  

[Guadaloopy 10,927]

Wait…. “Griddy”?   Surely this is not what is meant by FAAFO?

[TwiceHorn 31,305]

1 hour ago, ndawg said:

Yeah, I definitely appreciate it. Just wanted to square that discrepancy.

Being over 50GW is a new thing as of today.  Since Monday, anyway.

[Guadaloopy 10,927]

26 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

Getting fisted by the invisible hand!  

[Beau Vine 54,009]

4 hours ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

SIAP

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/Texas-grid-again-faces-scrutiny-over-cold-15955392.php

How much you want to bet that they followed the best practices that they themselves created with a constant eye on the costs. They're not going to listen to advice from impartial 3rd parties.

ERCOT and/or the PUC seem too much in bed in with the power generators when their main concern should always be the general public first. It's also bs that this went beyond the parameters of an extreme Texas winter. Once again, I assume they decided how extreme they wanted to view a Texas winter possibility.

If I had a time machine, one of the first things I would do is go back in time and kill the person who would eventually create the term "best practices."

and now, back to weather...

[Goredho 17,352]

2 hours ago, PenelopeWitherspoon said:

So, a friend of mine who is a former gas trader and started Real Simple Energy.   From his company:

 

“ERCOT cannot seem to get above 50,000 MW of generation. During peak demand times (mornings and evenings) over the next few days, the total Texas demand would be around 65,000 MW if everyone had power. This means there is an increased chance you get power during low demand periods like 10pm-5am and 12pm-4pm....but then it may go off during those high demand periods again.

 

Natural gas power plants, which power much of the Texas grid, receive natural gas deliveries to them daily via pipelines. Since this past weekend, they have struggled to get fuel (largely because of natural gas well freeze-offs) and we don't see much reason for this to change over the next few days. If they don't have fuel they cannot run.

 

Even power plants that have fuel struggle to run at maximum capacity for days-on-end. Many plants are just not made for it and when pushed too hard, they break, and that is what we have seen here. Repair of those plants takes time.

 

Wholesale power price futures for the next 5 days, traded by market participants with a lot more knowledge than us, are indicating this grid-wide stress continues through the weekend.”

What is a “well freeze-off”?  Just got too cold for the machinery to operate?

[TwiceHorn 31,305]

6 minutes ago, Goredho said:

What is a “well freeze-off”?  Just got too cold for the machinery to operate?

Long story short, gas often comes out of the ground pretty moist.  When it gets cold af, the wellhead ices up and gas won't come out.

 

 

Edited February 18, 2021 by TwiceHorn

[Beau Vine 54,009]

Quote

COLORADO CITY, Texas — Colorado City Mayor Tim Boyd has resigned.

Boyd acknowledged the resignation Tuesday afternoon while responding to criticism he received for a controversial Facebook post.

Tuesday morning, Boyd voiced his frustrations about residents who he said called him to complain about power and water outages.

"If you don’t have electricity, you step up and come up with a game plan to keep your family warm and safe," Boyd said. "Get off your ass and take care of your own family!"

Tuesday afternoon, Boyd posted another message.

"I would never want to hurt the elderly or anyone that is in true need of help to be left to fend for themselves," said Boyd. "I was only making the statement that those folks that are too lazy to get up and fend for themselves but are capable should not be dealt a handout. I apologize for the wording and some of the phrases that were used!"

Boyd said he had already turned in his resignation and did not file a ballot application to run in May.

"Please understand, if I had it to do over again, I would have just kept my words to myself and if I did say them I would have used better wording and been more descriptive," said Boyd.

Full text from original post

No one owes you or your family anything; nor is it the local governments responsibility to support you during trying times like this! Sink or swim, it’s your choice! The City and County, along with power providers or any other service owes you NOTHING! I’m sick and tired of people looking for a damn hand out! If you don’t have electricity you step up and come up with a game plan to keep your family warm and safe. If you have no water you deal with out and think outside of the box to survive and supply water to your family. If you were sitting at home in the cold because you have no power and are sitting there waiting for someone to come rescue you because your lazy is direct result of your raising! Only the strong will survive and the week will perish. Folks, God Has given us the tools to support ourselves in times like this. This is sadly a product of a socialist government where they feed people to believe that the FEW work and others will become dependent for handouts. Am I sorry that you have been dealing without electricity and water; yes! But I’ll be damned if I’m going to provide for anyone that is capable of doing it themselves! We have lost sight of those in need and those that take advantage of the system and mesh them into one group!! Bottom line, quit crying and looking for a handout! Get off your ass and take care of your own family!

Bottom line - DON’T BE A PART OF A PROBLEM, BE A PART OF THE SOLUTION!

Full text from second post

All, I have set back and watched all this escalating and have tried to keep my mouth shut! I won’t deny for one minute what I said in my post this morning. Believe me when I say that many of the things I said were taken out of context and some of which were said without putting much thought in to it. I would never want to hurt the elderly or anyone that is in true need of help to be left to fend for themselves. I was only making the statement that those folks that are too lazy to get up and fend for themselves but are capable should not be dealt a handout. I apologize for the wording and some of the phrases that were used! I had already turned in my resignation and had not signed up to run for mayor again on the deadline that was February 12th! I spoke some of this out of the anger that the city and county was catching for situations which were out of their control. Please understand if I had it to do over again I would have just kept my words to myself and if I did say them I would have used better wording and been more descriptive.

The anger and harassment you have caused my wife and family is so undeserved....my wife was laid off of her job based off the association people gave to her and the business she worked for. She’s a very good person and was only defending me! But her to have to get fired from her job over things I said out of context is so horrible. I admit, there are things that are said all the time that I don’t agree with; but I would never harass you or your family to the point that they would lose there livelihood such as a form of income.

I ask that you each understand I never meant to speak for the city of Colorado City or Mitchell county! I was speaking as a citizen as I am NOT THE MAYOR anymore. I apologize for the wording and ask that you please not harass myself or my family anymore!

Threatening our lives with comments and messages is a horrible thing to have to wonder about. I won’t share any of those messages from those names as I feel they know who they are and hope after they see this they will retract the hateful things they have said!

Thank you

Tim Boyd(citizen)

 

[Fudge Nuggets 19,151]

I didn’t realize asking the companies you pay money to each month to keep your shit on was asking for a handout.

[boilerhorn 1,335]

SIAP

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/Perry-says-Texans-wiling-to-suffer-blackouts-to-15956705.php

 

Quote

WASHINGTON - Former Texas governor Rick Perry suggests that going days without power is a sacrifice Texans should be willing to make if it means keeping federal regulators out of the state’s power grid.

In a blog posted on House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy's website, Perry is quoted responding to the claim that “those watching on the left may see the situation in Texas as an opportunity to expand their top-down, radical proposals.”

“Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business,” Perry is quoted as saying. “Try not to let whatever the crisis of the day is take your eye off of having a resilient grid that keeps America safe personally, economically, and strategically.”

Texas’s power grid, run by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, occupies a unique distinction in the United States in that it does not cross state lines and thus is not under the oversight of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

 

Eat another bag of dicks, Rick Perry

[PenelopeWitherspoon 19,094]

1 hour ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/dollar5152-power-bill-texas-winter-storm-hell-only-gets-worse?ref=home?ref=home

 

 

 

 

 

  Hide contents

Scott-Amos is not alone. Dozens of Griddy customers have blasted the wholesale power company for their outrageously high bills amid a winter disaster.

Despite the astronomical prices, Scott-Amos is considered one of the lucky ones, as millions of people across Texas are still without power while temperatures remain perilously low. The storm, which bulldozed through parts of the central and southern United States this week, has killed at least 30 people and hospitalized dozens more who have resorted to dangerous measures to stay warm.

“This is a double-edged sword,” Scott-Amos said. “Thankfully we have power, but at what price? We are using it minimally and getting charged thousands. Most people I know don’t even have power, and I’m getting these outrageous bills.”

While power outages have affected Americans across the country, from West Virginia to Oregon, Texas has been hit the hardest. On Tuesday, at least 4.3 million Texans were left in the dark. According to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which manages the state’s power grid, only 700,000 homes had their electricity restored overnight. More than 2.7 million customers still don’t have power.

“We know millions of people are suffering,” ERCOT President and CEO Bill Magness said in a Wednesday statement. “We have no other priority than getting them electricity. No other priority.”

But data from ERCOT suggests the price of getting the lights back on might be too steep for some Texans. As first reported by Reuters, the market prices on the power grid spiked more than 10,000 percent on Monday in the aftermath of the deep freeze. Prices skyrocketed to more than $9,000 per megawatt-hour—compared to the pre-storm prices of less than $50 per hour.

The amped-up wattage costs have affected Griddy customers in particular because of the company’s distinctive business model. In Texas’ hypercharged market for electricity, Griddy makes money by debiting its subscribers a flat $9.99 monthly fee—and then selling them raw power at its going wholesale value, effectively stripping out any insulation between consumers and the oscillations in supply and demand.

Often this saves Griddy customers money. But the wild surge in costs due to failures across ERCOT’s grid has juiced bills up to astounding levels. Griddy initially urged its customers to switch to another power provider, but few companies are accepting new accounts.

Exacerbating and prolonging this sticker shock is a decision on Tuesday by the state’s Power Utility Commission, which regulates the nonprofit ERCOT’s operations. The order from the gubernatorially appointed PUC asserted that, even with a hike coinciding with cold weather and increased heating use, ERCOT had been undercharging consumers for the cost of energy and directed it to raise its rates.

“We made the unprecedented decision to tell our customers—whom we worked really hard to get—that they are better off in the near term with another provider,” Michael Fallquist, chief executive officer of Griddy, previously said in a statement. “We want what’s right by our consumers, so we are encouraging them to leave.”

Royce Pierce, a 38-year-old contractor, is one of those Griddy customers who received a notice from the power company to abandon his service—a message he admitted to The Daily Beast he thought was “overly precautionary” as the winter storm loomed.

Now, his bill has skyrocketed over $7,000 in the last two days, he said. As of Wednesday, Pierce owes Griddy $8,162.73 for the month of February—a shocking price considering the bill for his two-story house was $387.70 just last month. Last February, Pierce said he only paid $330.

“It’s mindblowing. I honestly didn’t believe the price at first,” Pierce said on Wednesday. “It’s not a great feeling knowing that there is a looming bill that we just can’t afford.”

Like Scott-Amos, Pierce said his family has been trying to use as little electricity as possible to keep down the insane costs, including turning down the thermostat to 50 degrees and not using the lights or oven.

“I am walking around in my bathrobe right now to keep warm,” he added with a laugh. Stressing that he is hoping for a relief package from the state to help with the bill, Pierce said he is just living under the assumption “this is a later problem.”

“I just told my wife to stop checking. There is nothing we can do now. This is already an insane thing and I don’t care about the money when it comes to people’s health,” he said, adding that if his work had not been affected by COVID-19 and he was working full-time “we could have taken care of this.”

Griddy and ERCOT did not immediately respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment.

Texas officials have declared a state of emergency and the Lone Star state was hit with another arctic blast on Wednesday in what the National Weather Service has called “the worst of all the winter events over the past week.”

With the possibility that this winter disaster is far from over, Scott-Amos is worried that the price spikes might prompt some Texans to shut off their power—or take dangerous measures to keep warm.

“It’s like people who don’t go to the doctor or dentist because they don’t want to pay. People are desperate and you shouldn’t have to choose,” she said.

Dr. Sam Prater, a UTHealth emergency medicine physician with Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center, told The Daily Beast his Houston hospital had already seen at least 100 patients come in over 48 hours with carbon monoxide poisoning.

“This increase in cases of carbon monoxide poisoning is a mass casualty event and part of the larger public health disaster that Houston is currently facing,” he said.

Some residents have attempted to use their BBQ pits, campfire grills, or stovetops inside their homes to stay warm. Several people have died, including a Sharpstown woman and an 8-year-old girl who suffered suspected carbon monoxide poisoning after running their car in the garage to generate heat.

“This is a public health emergency. We have seen both adults and children in our emergency rooms for carbon monoxide poisoning as people without power do anything they can to keep their families warm during this arctic blast that has plagued the Houston area,” Prater added, stressing that residents should bundle up in layers and only warm-up in their cars outside of the garage.

Scott-Amos is outraged this public health emergency has been exacerbated by the “greed” of electrical companies.

“I think people are greedy. It doesn’t make sense,” she said. “I am dumbfounded. There is no compassion or grace for people.”

 

Honestly, and this is going to be harsh of me, I do not feel sorry for these people who a.  Got warned by their provider to switch because their bill would skyrocket, b. did not switch, c. still had power, and d. are bitching about their bill.  If you don't understand the product you signed up for (i.e. wholesale power), maybe you shouldn't have signed up for it.  You should have taken the warning to switch. You used the power, they are charging you the wholesale market price per the agreement you are party to, and now you owe it.

I do feel for the people who are just trying to get warm, but I also feel a little frustrated because it is common sense not to run a car in an enclosed space or to use things like propane grills etc. inside.  I mean, just because it is cold, the danger of those things in enclosed spaces doesn't magically go away.

[FORTY NINE TO ZERO 2,630]

Wait. People are getting 450 a day electric bills?  How?  Just griddy?

[PenelopeWitherspoon 19,094]

4 minutes ago, Xian said:

Wait. People are getting 450 a day electric bills?  How?  Just griddy?

Because they have a contract that charges them wholesale energy prices.  For the most part, those are MUCH lower than retail energy prices, but that also means they are going to fluctuate with day ahead or real time prices.  And real time prices today were 9k a MWH.  So per KWH, you are paying $9.  

[PenelopeWitherspoon 19,094]

Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought that everyone knew this massive storm was coming.  I know there were warnings over the weekend about stress to power grids, etc...

How were people completely unprepared?  

Looking Up

Remedios Cue and her husband lost power for about 50 hours in their home in Euless, between Dallas and Fort Worth. The temperature dropped to a low of 40 degrees Fahrenheit. They retreated to the bed.

“When we couldn’t stand it anymore, we’d go out to the cars, warm up and charge our phones,” said Cue, 60, a preschool teacher.

Her husband heated water on the outdoor grill and warmed up a sandwich in a skillet thrust into the fireplace.

“There was no warning,” she said. “No one said, “Prepare for this.’

[FORTY NINE TO ZERO 2,630]

4 minutes ago, PenelopeWitherspoon said:

Because they have a contract that charges them wholesale energy prices.  For the most part, those are MUCH lower than retail energy prices, but that also means they are going to fluctuate with day ahead or real time prices.  And real time prices today were 9k a MWH.  So per KWH, you are paying $9.  

Got it, is it just griddy? Or is anyone whos standard fix rate contract has lapsed and were automatically moved to month to Month variable by default?   

[JimmyJames 12,271]

13 minutes ago, boilerhorn said:

SIAP

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/Perry-says-Texans-wiling-to-suffer-blackouts-to-15956705.php

 

 

Eat another bag of dicks, Rick Perry

There is not a single man more responsible than what has happened this week than that aggy asshat perry and I guarantee you he has previously made multi millions on the death and destruction he has inflicted on the state today. He deserves the electric chair. 

[PenelopeWitherspoon 19,094]

Just now, Xian said:

Got it, is it just griddy? Or is anyone whos standard fix rate contract has lapsed and were automatically moved to month to Month variable by default?   

If your provider goes under, or you do not have an energy provider, you are moved to a provider of last resort. See what my friend's company says about that.

Our phones are lighting up from customers today in response to a local news article that has posted false information. The idea that someone would pay $9/kwhr if they go to a Provider of Last Resort (POLR) is absolutely false and that is not how it works. The POLRs would switch customers to short-term fixed-rate plans. The rate wouldn't be that great, but it wouldn't be anywhere close to $9.00/kwh.

 

In the unlikely situation you are moved to a POLR, you should take action ASAP to get on a longer-term, lower-priced, fixed rate plan. If you are a customer of Real Simple Energy, we handle all of this for you automatically.

 

Please try to stay safe and warm.

[Francisco 2.0 32,346]

16 minutes ago, Xian said:

Wait. People are getting 450 a day electric bills?  How?  Just griddy?

Think of Griddy as Uber's surge pricing.  

[FORTY NINE TO ZERO 2,630]

Good. I was worried for a second. My discount power fixed contact expired a month ago and i havent has a chance to shop for a new contract.   They auto moved me to their monthly flex rate plan 

Edited February 18, 2021 by Xian

[Goredho 17,352]

22 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

Long story short, gas often comes out of the ground pretty moist.  When it gets cold af, the wellhead ices up and gas won't come out.

 

 

Thanks, the link you had originally had a link to this article which I found very informative https://rbnenergy.com/terminal-frost-extreme-cold-wreaks-havoc-with-natural-gas-producers-power-generators-and-everybody-in-between

 

[spoiler]

If you’re reading this, it means you’ve got access to power and internet. Count yourself among the fortunate today. Rolling blackouts and brownouts across the middle of the country and in Texas, have disrupted businesses and lives. It’s been particularly brutal in the Lone Star State. Electricity and natural gas are commodities that are so basic to our way of living that it’s easy to take for granted the efforts designed to make them reliable, available, and affordable. But, boy, does it make things difficult when they don’t show up as anticipated. In today’s blog, we discuss the factors behind the supply disruptions that are wreaking havoc in these commodity markets.

 

 

In Monday’s blog, East is East, West is West, we discussed the mayhem that unfolded in the physical gas market in trading for the weekend (and in weekend trading) as a massive spike in demand and a supply contraction (both in terms of production and interregional flows) created localized supply shortages and resulted in record, triple-digit gas prices across the Midcontinent and West. The exorbitant price premiums prompted non-essential gas demand to shut off, including LNG feedgas deliveries. [As noted in our LNG Voyager report, Texas Governor Greg Abbott reportedly asked the Freeport LNG terminal to reduce its feedgas intake. Pipeline flow data as of yesterday indicated both Freeport and Cheniere Energy’s Corpus Christi facility were already receiving less gas than usual. Cameron and Cheniere’s Sabine Pass facility in Louisiana also were seeing declines as weather conditions have been disrupting pipeline flows and terminal and marine operations. Piloting services have been intermittent all along the Gulf Coast due to fog and the hard freeze.] The chaos spilled over into trading on ICE Tuesday morning, when regular trading resumed for next-day gas and cash trades left Friday’s record prices in the dust — cash trading opened just under $1,000/MMBtu at some Midcontinent pricing locations and the NGI index for Oklahoma Gas Transmission (OGT) posted at $945/MMBtu. Prices were so out of whack that the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) trading platform had to increase the maximum allowable price at some U.S. physical gas trading hubs, which just speaks to the level of pandemonium still gripping the physical gas market.

Just how unusual is Winter Storm Uri? Exhibit A: the photo below of a cross-country skier gliding through a residential area in Austin, TX, yesterday.

Austin Skier spotted Sunday, February 15, the latest testament that Austin is still weird; said one Austinite, “People were full-on skiing on RM 2222. It was like the Winter Olympics out here.”

To state the obvious, prices are a function of both demand and supply, and this Arctic event has been a doozy for both sides of that equation. Not only have record electric generation and heating demand been competing for gas supply, particularly in the Central U.S., but supply has taken a big hit, as freezing temperatures and widespread power outages have led to extensive freeze-offs at the wellhead as well as other types of upstream and pipeline outages that have crippled producers’ ability to get volumes to market. Today our focus is on the factors that stifled production in some of the most resource-rich areas of the country. 

Initial pipeline data as of early Tuesday indicates Lower-48 gas production is down a whopping 10.6 Bcf since Friday to 76.1 Bcf/d and down 15 Bcf/d from the recent high of 91.1 Bcf/d seen a week ago on Friday, February 5. At this level, production is also 18 Bcf (~20%) lower than this time last year and more than 5 Bcf/d below the 5-yr average. To be clear, that 76 Bcf/d volume is the grossed up, modeled data, not just the reported interstate pipeline receipts. Pipeline flows show declines across basins but particularly concentrated in the Midcontinent’s Anadarko region and the Permian in West Texas which just are not equipped to deal with an Arctic outbreak like this. With domestic production curtailed, imports from our Canadian neighbors have jumped to upwards of 8 Bcf/d for the past two days, up more than 1 Bcf/d since Friday and the highest since January 2018. Meanwhile, LNG sendout (regasified volumes delivered from LNG terminals to the U.S. pipeline network) has climbed to nearly 1.5 Bcf/d as soaring inland prices call feedgas back into the pipeline grid.

Figure 1. Lower-48 Natural Gas Production. Source: RBN NATGAS Billboard

As we said, both freeze-offs and power outages are contributing to the production losses. We’ll take those by turn, starting with freeze-offs.

Natural gas wellhead freeze-offs — a phenomena where low temperatures crystallize the water produced along with natural gas, forcing blockages at the wellhead — happen when outside temperatures drop below freezing in producing fields. The consequences range from minor inconvenience to major reductions in natural gas production and power outages affecting millions of customers. From a scale of 1 to 10, you could say Texas’s trouble has been turned up to 11 in terms of gas supply and power failure.

What exactly causes production freeze-offs? We first elaborated on this back in 2012 in our Cold As Ice blog, but here’s the Cliffs Notes. The production stream from a gas well contains raw gas mixed with various amounts of water and oil condensates that have to be promptly separated before the gas can be placed in a gathering‐system pipeline and sent to a processing plant. Since the advent of the Shale Revolution, two trends have increased the magnitude of freeze-offs. The first is that over the course of the last decade, production has increasingly focused on plays that feature wet gas containing higher quantities (measured as gallons per Mcf, or GPM) of natural gas liquids. The higher the liquids content of natural gas, the higher the risk of hydrates forming and causing freeze-offs. Moreover, as drilling activity has shifted toward targeting oil and NGLs in the Permian and SCOOP/STACK, the gas streams in those regions are particularly “wet” and susceptible to freeze-offs when temperatures do get below freezing for extended periods of time.

The second freeze-off risk factor is because hydraulic fracturing involves pumping thousands of gallons of water into the well — a proportion of which remains underground and rises to the surface with production (see Tales of the Tight Sand Laterals). The presence of that water increases the likelihood of freeze-offs in cold weather. For these reasons, freeze-offs are more typical in deep offshore wells and wells in northerly production regions and are a headache for oilier/wetter product streams.

Further, hydrates — the ice formed in the presence of low temperatures, high pressures, water and condensates — proliferate in well chokes, pipelines, and valves. The molecules encapsulate each other in a diamond shape and lock up, making them much harder to melt or dissolve than everyday ice-from-water. No question, this is the stuff of production and pipeline operators’ worst nightmares and it’s become reality across the Permian and Midcon basins in recent days. These southern production regions are ill-prepared for what’s unfolding. Deep offshore and northern production regions regularly experience lower temperatures during winter and are equipped to combat hydrates using a number of techniques, including bleeding methanol into the product stream. That’s not something the Lower Midcontinent and Texas producers typically have had to deal with, at least not to the extent required by a freeze of this magnitude.

 

 

There are several points at which freeze-offs are common and can block the gas flow, including: right at the wellhead pipe-and-valve “Christmas tree,” in the inlet scrubber or separator that splits out the gas, water and condensate streams, and again just as the gas exits the separator and flows into the gathering system. There are processes to keep the wellhead operational, including the removal of water and condensates that accumulate in limited onsite storage breakdown. But these systems can automatically shut down production flows if those storage tanks don’t drain and fill to capacity. Similarly, freeze-offs can worsen if operators aren’t able to replenish the chemicals that prevent condensation in the gathering systems.

You can bet that maintenance crews are in overdrive right now, working 24/7 to keep valves operating where possible, both at the wellhead and between gathering systems and downstream pipelines, assuming road conditions allow access and assuming downstream pipelines are still able to move the volumes (more on the transportation roadblocks in a bit). However, these sub-freezing temperatures make it very difficult to keep separators and heater treaters hot enough to separate water from gas and crude and then stabilize the crude streams to meet Reid vapor pressure (RVP) limits. Even just keeping the heater treaters lit is a challenge in conditions this cold. Heater treaters burn gas from the lease, but if you can’t get the gas separated from the water and oil, the gas stream won’t stay lit. We can imagine that water tanks are no fun to keep flowing either in these frigid conditions.

In the oil- and liquids-driven basins, as gas output freezes off, so do crude and NGL volumes. (Yesterday, Occidental Petroleum, the second-largest oil producer in the Permian, became the first to officially declare force majeure, telling customers that freezing weather conditions caused transportation disruptions, according to a Bloomberg news report.) And, once volumes are affected, it can take days and a stretch of consistently warmer weather to remove hydrates with methanol, hot fluids, and pigs in the field, especially when all equipment and resources are stretched thin across several states and crews are working in dangerous conditions.

So how long can we expect production losses to persist? Well, there’s really not a good historical precedent here — it’s never gotten quite this cold in the Lower Midcontinent and Texas regions, and even when it has gotten anywhere close, there wasn’t as much gas being produced as there is now. But if we go back to another cold wave in recent history — during the winter of 2017-18 — we can get some context (Figure 2). During that period, population-weighted temperatures fell below 40 degrees Fahrenheit on Christmas Day (meaning that some areas experienced much colder temperatures) and continued lower with the national average temperatures dropping below freezing on December 31, 2017, and bottoming out around 28.5 degrees on January 1, 2018 (blue line). It wasn’t until January 3 that the population-weighted national average rose above the freezing point (purple line). All told, overall average U.S. temperatures remained below 40 degrees for 14 days, and it wasn’t until January 11, 2018, that they returned to 50 degrees, just briefly. That was followed by another, five-day sub-40-degree period in mid-January 2018. That Arctic outbreak affected much of the Eastern and Central U.S. including parts of Texas. Lower-48 production (navy-blue area in Figure 2) fell from around 80 Bcf/d to about 72 Bcf/d over a period of about six days and remained there for a few days before climbing as temperatures rose back above the freezing point. About half the offline volumes returned within days. But it took another two weeks or so of sustained higher temperatures for volumes to reach 80 Bcf/d again.

Figure 2. Winter 2017-18 Freeze-Off Event, L48 Gas Production vs. Temps. Source: RBN NATGAS Billboard

This time around, conditions appear to be more dire and a lot more production is offline, volume-wise. So it’s hard to draw any definitive conclusions, but the bottom line is that it’s likely to take weeks for production to recover, depending on weather and other factors.

What’s more, as we mentioned above, power and pipeline outages are compounding production losses, and freeze-offs are a moot point if there’s no electricity for powering operations and pipelines or rigs are forced to shut down. As power outages have spread in the past few days, there’s plenty of that going around too. A power grid failure in a production basin has numerous repercussions that ultimately result in shut-in wells. Without a power source, all instrumentation and measurement equipment shuts down. Producers can’t measure or manage flows. And finally, what gas supply there is, is facing obstacles further downstream. Most pipelines operate their valves via electricity and hydraulics. Frozen valves and a loss of power means crews have to jump through hoops to make it all work — manually. While producers and pipeline operators in northerly regions like the Bakken plan for these types of issues — they install heaters on all critical equipment — that’s not been the case in Texas. More than 30 gas pipelines have declared force majeure or have instituted operational flow orders, which restrict the amount of fuel shippers can put on their systems. Combined with the effects of freeze-offs, it’s contributing to the deficit of gas to serve electric generators. So it’s a vicious cycle we’re witnessing. All indications are that as temperatures rise, power is restored, and instrumentation and valves thaw out, it will take time for infrastructure to catch up before production volumes can bounce back.

[/spoiler]

[PenelopeWitherspoon 19,094]

8 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Think of Griddy as Uber's surge pricing.  

Well, not really.  Griddy is a provider you can choose.  You pay a monthly fee, and rather than paying retail rates, you get charged wholesale rates.  Wholesale rates are generally $30-50 MWh, except for during extreme demand events.  So, if you average in February $30.5 MWh, you pay $0.035 per kwh for your power.  I having checked prices lately, but that is probably at least 2 times lower than the closest retail rate.  

However, if you know extreme weather is coming, you are smart to change to a more traditional provider.  

[Mole 4,320]

8 hours ago, Born to Run said:

my small town brother and mom lost all the food in her fridge...

why didn't you put it outside???

I grew up in the north. I remember one winter when our fridge went out, we just threw everything in the snow on the back porch. It was a little weird to put on my coat to make hot pockets, but it seemed like a pretty obvious solution.

[Bateshorn 9,908]

2 hours ago, TwiceHorn said:

Long story short, gas often comes out of the ground pretty moist.  When it gets cold af, the wellhead ices up and gas won't come out.

 

 

Seems like something they might have wanted to winterize.  You know like they do in CO, ND, and PA? But Texas is fucking special gas, unique, not like that Canadian, Russian, or Alaska gas.

 I’m just saying.

Edited February 18, 2021 by Bateshorn

[The Ace of Aces 5,106]

4 hours ago, PenelopeWitherspoon said:

That is also true.  The issue there is when they have a unit go down, they are connected to the US GRID, and ERCOT is not.  So if NYISO has some plants go down, it can get energy from PJM to balance everything.  I think the last widespread blackout in the NE was 2003, and you can see how if one part of the grid went down, it took a lot of the rest of it out.  Fun times.

Interestingly, I don’t remember any issues in that 2014 cold wave here in Pennsylvania. I’m not saying it didn’t happen, but it wasn’t really a big issue for down-the-line consumers. God bless PMJ and, more specifically, PPL.

[JimmyJames 12,271]

1 hour ago, Goredho said:

Thanks, the link you had originally had a link to this article which I found very informative https://rbnenergy.com/terminal-frost-extreme-cold-wreaks-havoc-with-natural-gas-producers-power-generators-and-everybody-in-between

 

[spoiler]

If you’re reading this, it means you’ve got access to power and internet. Count yourself among the fortunate today. Rolling blackouts and brownouts across the middle of the country and in Texas, have disrupted businesses and lives. It’s been particularly brutal in the Lone Star State. Electricity and natural gas are commodities that are so basic to our way of living that it’s easy to take for granted the efforts designed to make them reliable, available, and affordable. But, boy, does it make things difficult when they don’t show up as anticipated. In today’s blog, we discuss the factors behind the supply disruptions that are wreaking havoc in these commodity markets.

 

 

In Monday’s blog, East is East, West is West, we discussed the mayhem that unfolded in the physical gas market in trading for the weekend (and in weekend trading) as a massive spike in demand and a supply contraction (both in terms of production and interregional flows) created localized supply shortages and resulted in record, triple-digit gas prices across the Midcontinent and West. The exorbitant price premiums prompted non-essential gas demand to shut off, including LNG feedgas deliveries. [As noted in our LNG Voyager report, Texas Governor Greg Abbott reportedly asked the Freeport LNG terminal to reduce its feedgas intake. Pipeline flow data as of yesterday indicated both Freeport and Cheniere Energy’s Corpus Christi facility were already receiving less gas than usual. Cameron and Cheniere’s Sabine Pass facility in Louisiana also were seeing declines as weather conditions have been disrupting pipeline flows and terminal and marine operations. Piloting services have been intermittent all along the Gulf Coast due to fog and the hard freeze.] The chaos spilled over into trading on ICE Tuesday morning, when regular trading resumed for next-day gas and cash trades left Friday’s record prices in the dust — cash trading opened just under $1,000/MMBtu at some Midcontinent pricing locations and the NGI index for Oklahoma Gas Transmission (OGT) posted at $945/MMBtu. Prices were so out of whack that the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) trading platform had to increase the maximum allowable price at some U.S. physical gas trading hubs, which just speaks to the level of pandemonium still gripping the physical gas market.

Just how unusual is Winter Storm Uri? Exhibit A: the photo below of a cross-country skier gliding through a residential area in Austin, TX, yesterday.

Austin Skier spotted Sunday, February 15, the latest testament that Austin is still weird; said one Austinite, “People were full-on skiing on RM 2222. It was like the Winter Olympics out here.”

To state the obvious, prices are a function of both demand and supply, and this Arctic event has been a doozy for both sides of that equation. Not only have record electric generation and heating demand been competing for gas supply, particularly in the Central U.S., but supply has taken a big hit, as freezing temperatures and widespread power outages have led to extensive freeze-offs at the wellhead as well as other types of upstream and pipeline outages that have crippled producers’ ability to get volumes to market. Today our focus is on the factors that stifled production in some of the most resource-rich areas of the country. 

Initial pipeline data as of early Tuesday indicates Lower-48 gas production is down a whopping 10.6 Bcf since Friday to 76.1 Bcf/d and down 15 Bcf/d from the recent high of 91.1 Bcf/d seen a week ago on Friday, February 5. At this level, production is also 18 Bcf (~20%) lower than this time last year and more than 5 Bcf/d below the 5-yr average. To be clear, that 76 Bcf/d volume is the grossed up, modeled data, not just the reported interstate pipeline receipts. Pipeline flows show declines across basins but particularly concentrated in the Midcontinent’s Anadarko region and the Permian in West Texas which just are not equipped to deal with an Arctic outbreak like this. With domestic production curtailed, imports from our Canadian neighbors have jumped to upwards of 8 Bcf/d for the past two days, up more than 1 Bcf/d since Friday and the highest since January 2018. Meanwhile, LNG sendout (regasified volumes delivered from LNG terminals to the U.S. pipeline network) has climbed to nearly 1.5 Bcf/d as soaring inland prices call feedgas back into the pipeline grid.

Figure 1. Lower-48 Natural Gas Production. Source: RBN NATGAS Billboard

As we said, both freeze-offs and power outages are contributing to the production losses. We’ll take those by turn, starting with freeze-offs.

Natural gas wellhead freeze-offs — a phenomena where low temperatures crystallize the water produced along with natural gas, forcing blockages at the wellhead — happen when outside temperatures drop below freezing in producing fields. The consequences range from minor inconvenience to major reductions in natural gas production and power outages affecting millions of customers. From a scale of 1 to 10, you could say Texas’s trouble has been turned up to 11 in terms of gas supply and power failure.

What exactly causes production freeze-offs? We first elaborated on this back in 2012 in our Cold As Ice blog, but here’s the Cliffs Notes. The production stream from a gas well contains raw gas mixed with various amounts of water and oil condensates that have to be promptly separated before the gas can be placed in a gathering‐system pipeline and sent to a processing plant. Since the advent of the Shale Revolution, two trends have increased the magnitude of freeze-offs. The first is that over the course of the last decade, production has increasingly focused on plays that feature wet gas containing higher quantities (measured as gallons per Mcf, or GPM) of natural gas liquids. The higher the liquids content of natural gas, the higher the risk of hydrates forming and causing freeze-offs. Moreover, as drilling activity has shifted toward targeting oil and NGLs in the Permian and SCOOP/STACK, the gas streams in those regions are particularly “wet” and susceptible to freeze-offs when temperatures do get below freezing for extended periods of time.

The second freeze-off risk factor is because hydraulic fracturing involves pumping thousands of gallons of water into the well — a proportion of which remains underground and rises to the surface with production (see Tales of the Tight Sand Laterals). The presence of that water increases the likelihood of freeze-offs in cold weather. For these reasons, freeze-offs are more typical in deep offshore wells and wells in northerly production regions and are a headache for oilier/wetter product streams.

Further, hydrates — the ice formed in the presence of low temperatures, high pressures, water and condensates — proliferate in well chokes, pipelines, and valves. The molecules encapsulate each other in a diamond shape and lock up, making them much harder to melt or dissolve than everyday ice-from-water. No question, this is the stuff of production and pipeline operators’ worst nightmares and it’s become reality across the Permian and Midcon basins in recent days. These southern production regions are ill-prepared for what’s unfolding. Deep offshore and northern production regions regularly experience lower temperatures during winter and are equipped to combat hydrates using a number of techniques, including bleeding methanol into the product stream. That’s not something the Lower Midcontinent and Texas producers typically have had to deal with, at least not to the extent required by a freeze of this magnitude.

 

 

There are several points at which freeze-offs are common and can block the gas flow, including: right at the wellhead pipe-and-valve “Christmas tree,” in the inlet scrubber or separator that splits out the gas, water and condensate streams, and again just as the gas exits the separator and flows into the gathering system. There are processes to keep the wellhead operational, including the removal of water and condensates that accumulate in limited onsite storage breakdown. But these systems can automatically shut down production flows if those storage tanks don’t drain and fill to capacity. Similarly, freeze-offs can worsen if operators aren’t able to replenish the chemicals that prevent condensation in the gathering systems.

You can bet that maintenance crews are in overdrive right now, working 24/7 to keep valves operating where possible, both at the wellhead and between gathering systems and downstream pipelines, assuming road conditions allow access and assuming downstream pipelines are still able to move the volumes (more on the transportation roadblocks in a bit). However, these sub-freezing temperatures make it very difficult to keep separators and heater treaters hot enough to separate water from gas and crude and then stabilize the crude streams to meet Reid vapor pressure (RVP) limits. Even just keeping the heater treaters lit is a challenge in conditions this cold. Heater treaters burn gas from the lease, but if you can’t get the gas separated from the water and oil, the gas stream won’t stay lit. We can imagine that water tanks are no fun to keep flowing either in these frigid conditions.

In the oil- and liquids-driven basins, as gas output freezes off, so do crude and NGL volumes. (Yesterday, Occidental Petroleum, the second-largest oil producer in the Permian, became the first to officially declare force majeure, telling customers that freezing weather conditions caused transportation disruptions, according to a Bloomberg news report.) And, once volumes are affected, it can take days and a stretch of consistently warmer weather to remove hydrates with methanol, hot fluids, and pigs in the field, especially when all equipment and resources are stretched thin across several states and crews are working in dangerous conditions.

So how long can we expect production losses to persist? Well, there’s really not a good historical precedent here — it’s never gotten quite this cold in the Lower Midcontinent and Texas regions, and even when it has gotten anywhere close, there wasn’t as much gas being produced as there is now. But if we go back to another cold wave in recent history — during the winter of 2017-18 — we can get some context (Figure 2). During that period, population-weighted temperatures fell below 40 degrees Fahrenheit on Christmas Day (meaning that some areas experienced much colder temperatures) and continued lower with the national average temperatures dropping below freezing on December 31, 2017, and bottoming out around 28.5 degrees on January 1, 2018 (blue line). It wasn’t until January 3 that the population-weighted national average rose above the freezing point (purple line). All told, overall average U.S. temperatures remained below 40 degrees for 14 days, and it wasn’t until January 11, 2018, that they returned to 50 degrees, just briefly. That was followed by another, five-day sub-40-degree period in mid-January 2018. That Arctic outbreak affected much of the Eastern and Central U.S. including parts of Texas. Lower-48 production (navy-blue area in Figure 2) fell from around 80 Bcf/d to about 72 Bcf/d over a period of about six days and remained there for a few days before climbing as temperatures rose back above the freezing point. About half the offline volumes returned within days. But it took another two weeks or so of sustained higher temperatures for volumes to reach 80 Bcf/d again.

Figure 2. Winter 2017-18 Freeze-Off Event, L48 Gas Production vs. Temps. Source: RBN NATGAS Billboard

This time around, conditions appear to be more dire and a lot more production is offline, volume-wise. So it’s hard to draw any definitive conclusions, but the bottom line is that it’s likely to take weeks for production to recover, depending on weather and other factors.

What’s more, as we mentioned above, power and pipeline outages are compounding production losses, and freeze-offs are a moot point if there’s no electricity for powering operations and pipelines or rigs are forced to shut down. As power outages have spread in the past few days, there’s plenty of that going around too. A power grid failure in a production basin has numerous repercussions that ultimately result in shut-in wells. Without a power source, all instrumentation and measurement equipment shuts down. Producers can’t measure or manage flows. And finally, what gas supply there is, is facing obstacles further downstream. Most pipelines operate their valves via electricity and hydraulics. Frozen valves and a loss of power means crews have to jump through hoops to make it all work — manually. While producers and pipeline operators in northerly regions like the Bakken plan for these types of issues — they install heaters on all critical equipment — that’s not been the case in Texas. More than 30 gas pipelines have declared force majeure or have instituted operational flow orders, which restrict the amount of fuel shippers can put on their systems. Combined with the effects of freeze-offs, it’s contributing to the deficit of gas to serve electric generators. So it’s a vicious cycle we’re witnessing. All indications are that as temperatures rise, power is restored, and instrumentation and valves thaw out, it will take time for infrastructure to catch up before production volumes can bounce back.

[/spoiler]

TLDR. Die citizens die. 

[JimmyJames 12,271]

1 hour ago, Fudge Nuggets said:

I didn’t realize asking the companies you pay money to each month to keep your shit on was asking for a handout.

After you pay the energy company for your energy you need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and create your own energy for your own house. - Republicans 

[Fastbreak 3,959]

My parents are still without power and now they are talking about shutting off water. This is in Zilker fucking Park. Heads need to roll for this shit. People are dying. 
 

fuck Republicans. I hope they all rot in hell. 

[SizzleChest 8,275]

9 minutes ago, The Ace of Aces said:

Interestingly, I don’t remember any issues in that 2014 cold wave here in Pennsylvania. I’m not saying it didn’t happen, but it wasn’t really a big issue for down-the-line consumers. God bless PMJ and, more specifically, PPL.

I lived outside Philly then and never lost power or water.  Only time I lost power the whole time I lived there was 3-4 days due to Sandy (downed lines).

[Bateshorn 9,908]

Maryland here, never lost power for more than 1-2 days in the winter.  Ex-wife from Maine. Never lost power in a blizzard for more than 24 hours.  Your leaders suck, Texas.  Don’t put this on government regulations: we may have a moderate GOP governor, but the Dems have had a supermajority for 2 decades. 

4 minutes ago, SizzleChest said:

I lived outside Philly then and never lost power or water.  Only time I lost power the whole time I lived there was 3-4 days due to Sandy (downed lines).

 

Edited February 18, 2021 by Bateshorn

[JimmyJames 12,271]

Energy deregulation in Texas was a horrific idea from the start and what happened this week was entirely predictable and in fact we even got a preview of it in 2011 on a smaller scale.

But at least Rick Perry, Greg Abbott and their ilk are doing just fine. 

Fuck all y’all.