Here is the state-by-state update on the natural gas crisis in the southwest:
New Mexico:
The New Mexico Gas Company reported yesterday that 32,000 customers statewide were without natural gas – less than the 40,000 number that was floated briefly when I was writing my article last night. Note that the company shut off the service to thoese areas in response to low pressure in their pipelines. Not sure how they selected who should be shut off...it would be interesting to know! Restarting will be tedious, because they have to visit each affected home or business twice – first to shut off the main gas valve, then they return to open the valve, purge the system and relight pilots.
Their website shows the following specific service disruptions in New Mexico:
Santa Clara Pueblo (all)
Okway Owingeh Pueblo (all)
San Ildefonso Pueblo (portion)
Santa Ana Pueblo (portion)
Espanola (2,600 customers)
Bernalillo and Placitas (5,000 customers)
Taos, Questa, Red River (10,800 customers)
Coronado Village Mobile Home Park (200)
Silver City (750)
Tularosa, La Luz, Alamagordo (2,500)
Other news sources are reporting the following:
Arizona
Tucson – 14,000 customers without gas, and no word on when it will be restored. See here.
Texas
El Paso Pipeline Company appears to be the biggest player in the crisis, as they own and operate 42,000 miles of pipeline in the U.S. (more than any other company). Their lines leaving west Texas are the primary supply avenues for New Mexico, Arizona and Southern California. They are not stating what their problem was, but this morning they declared force majeure on their pipelines. A number of articles suggest that rolling blackouts in Texas disrupted processing plants or compressor stations, and that the bitter cold caused a number of wellheads to freeze. Frozen wellheads are responsible for cutting U.S. daily production from 62 Bcf (billion cubic feet) to 57.5 Bcf (more than 7 percent) according to Bentek.
California
San Diego – After experiencing pressure drops in its pipelines, SDG&E cut off 88 of its largest customers who had interruptible rates – discounts offered in exchange for an agreement to shut down in just this sort of emergency. An article just out says that SDG&E’s problem was contractual: it tried to purchase enough gas on the spot market to serve its customers, but they couldn’t because they kept getting outbid by companies elsewhere.
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Tuesday, February 8, 2011 at 10:52PM 
Be sure to tune in to KUNM this Thursday morning at 8, because I'll be one of Arcie Chapa’s guests on the Call-In Show and we’ll be talking about the natural gas crisis that shut down gas service to at least 32,000 customers in New Mexico. State Representative Brian Egolf is planning to join us by telephone, and New Mexico Gas Company promises they will send someone over (although they aren’t saying who it will be). Should be interesting, no?
Will This Natural Gas Crisis Inspire Change?
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.