Natural Gas Safeguards Energy System Through Winter Storms
Over the past several weeks, much of the country has experienced extreme cold and winter storms. Natural gas has been pivotal to keeping millions of Americans safely and affordably warm throughout these winter storms.
Typically, the colder it is, the more natural gas America requires. During the recent winter storms, natural gas demand reached record highs on multiple consecutive days, with natural gas consumption reaching 184 billion cubic feet (BCF) on January 20 and 21. Natural gas has a few unique characteristics that make it so well suited to be the background of our energy system.
First, the infrastructure used to distribute natural gas is particularly well suited to holding up through extreme weather conditions. Natural gas pipelines are almost all underground, and therefore highly resistant to everything from hurricanes to ice storms. Falling tree limbs during ice storms simply don’t pose the same kind of threat to buried pipelines that they do to above-ground infrastructure. That means that the energy those pipelines carry can reliably make it to wherever it’s needed most.
Natural gas can also be stored safely and affordably for long periods of time. AGA member companies build and maintain large underground storage facilities to hold immense reserves of natural gas. These storage facilities were pivotal for maintaining system reliability during the past few weeks, with January 21 posting the highest daily withdrawal on record, reaching 71.2 Bcf.While natural gas production infrastructure is generally resilient against extreme weather, freeze offs in upstream production can occur when temperatures are low enough, and spiking demand can lead to consumption outstripping production. The natural gas kept in dispatchable storage facilities mitigates this as a problem. That means customers can rest assured that the natural gas they need for heat will be physically available. Storage also helps keep customer prices lower – natural gas utilities can purchase gas many months in advance when prices are low, they can mitigate the impact of temporary price fluctuations on customer bills. If market prices are ten percent higher for a few days, that doesn’t mean the customer bill will be 10 percent higher, because their utility paid for much of that natural gas months ago at a lower price.
Storage matters because the fluctuations in energy consumption throughout the year are massive. The natural gas delivery system delivers three times as much energy on the coldest day of the year as the electrical grid does on the hottest day. Often, those times when heating demand is highest – for example, nights during winter storms – are when production from sources like solar energy is at its lowest ebb. Natural gas, by contrast, works on our schedule. As a dispatchable source of baseload energy, natural gas serves as the backbone of the energy system, with natural gas power plants waiting to come online when needed and natural gas furnaces in your home that produce heat on demand.
Throughout the recent storms, tens of millions of our fellow Americans – quite possibly including you – slept warmly, and safely, thanks to the safe, reliable and affordable energy natural gas provides. This is the result of more than a century of lessons learned, hard work, and investments by our industry in advancing America’s energy system and infrastructure. We learned more lessons from what worked this time, and our industry will be even better prepared for the next storm.