Hard to believe it’s been ten years since a spell of unusually cold weather took us to the brink of losing pressure in the country’s natural gas pipelines, but here we are again. About 40,000 New Mexican Gas Company customers don’t have gas service right now because the pipelines that deliver their gas can’t keep up with the demand. New Mexico, with at least ten cities affected, has been hardest hit by outages, but natural gas service is also out in parts of El Paso, Tucson and San Diego, and the problem looks as if it may still be spreading.
Ironically, as customers without gas service turn to electric heaters, the demand for natural gas could actually rise further as the spike in electrical demand triggers utility gas-turbine generators to start up. When that happens, gas is essentially still being used for heating, but via a far less efficient process – one that first turns the gas into electricity and sends it down the wires before customers turn the gas-generated electricity back into heat.
There are still many questions as events continues unfolding, but the question that should be on everyone’s mind is this one: Will this crisis awaken us to the vulnerability of relying on big, central networks like the gas pipelines and the electric grid, and prompt us to develop local self-reliance in energy?
Sadly, I have reason to doubt that it will.
First of all, the natural gas crisis we faced ten years ago was worse than our current crisis, and it certainly didn’t prompt any movement toward self-reliance. At that time the production of natural gas in our most prolific basins was declining fast – so fast that we were unable to drill new wells fast enough to make up for the declines in existing wells. Essentially we were running on a treadmill, unable to run fast enough to keep the nation’s storage tanks filled. When energy traders realized the tanks were just days away from empty, they began bidding up the price of gas, sending heating bills soaring to record levels. But then a miracle occurred: Spring arrived. Natural gas demand collapsed, and everyone forgot all about the crisis. (Well, almost everyone – the nonprofit Local Energy was born out of the seven months of research that I and my colleagues undertook following the event.)
This time around, thanks to an advance in gas production called hydraulic fracturing and an abysmal economy, it doesn’t appear that we ran short of gas. Nope, this time it wasn’t anything nearly as serious as depletion of a major energy resource. The problem was simply that our pipelines weren’t up to matching the power of a storm measuring two-thousand miles across and dropping temperatures as much as 30 degrees below normal over much of the country. The sudden demand for heating fuel could have been met with the gas in storage had there been sufficient pipeline capacity to deliver the gas quickly enough. Delivery was further frustrated, according to reports, by problems at gas-compressor stations that may have been a result of rolling electrical blackouts – another consequence of the high heating demand created by the storm.
My guess is that the discussion of energy self-reliance is still nowhere near the table. More likely, our new governor and her experts will advocate that we avoid further crises by accelerating investments in our gas pipelines and electric transmission lines. But every dollar we spend on these highly centralized networks increases our dependence on them, and diverts valuable resources away from the effort we must undertake: building the decentralized, public, democratically controlled networks that will provide energy for our future.
Mustering the courage and the will to build decentralized public networks will never come from news reports, cost/benefit studies or climate regulations – it can only come from the understanding that without such systems, we are sunk. As the old saying goes, if you don’t watch where you’re going, you’ll end up where you’re headed.
It’s high time we changed our course.