[pravus]

I'm not sure how much it would really be needed. Part of my family owned and operated a gas measurement business in West Texas and I don't recall ever having to do anything special for winter conditions on pipelines. Most of the water and oil comes out with the plunger lift in the well head and is stored on-site next to the well. Trucks come to haul it off and one of our jobs was to coordinate all of that plus maintenance.

There are glycol stations but as I recall those are really only used in gathering systems with a compressor. The large plants will have tons of equipment online to condition the gas before pushing it upstream. The biggest issue we ever had was just baby-sitting compressors in the middle of the night because some of them just really don't like to operate in cold conditions.

I used to test the gas in a lab and there wouldn't be enough water vapor left in the line to cause any issues under freezing. You have far more issues with carbon sludge build-up since anything above butane just really wants to be a liquid. That area typically produces wells with something like 4% N2, 70-80% C1, 2% CO2, and the rest is basically C2+ with maybe some H2S in a few places. It's very easy gas to pipe around for the most part.

[Animats]

That's very helpful. Press info in this area is politicized enough that the engineering info isn't getting through.

Any comments on this: “Gathering lines freeze, and the wells get so cold that they can’t produce,” said Parker Fawcett, a natural gas analyst for S&P Global Platts.[1]

[1] https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/natural-gas-power-st...

[SeanLuke]

??? Texas's 2021 winter disaster, which the Governor stupidly blamed on wind turbines, turned out to be largely caused by frozen natural gas delivery components.

[snypher]

The person you replied to seems to say that freezing equipment can be a problem, not the freezing of the gas/pipeline contents themselves.

[fbdab103]

>There was not only insufficient power generation capacity online, but also insufficient natural gas supply to the power plants. The failure of some gas distribution infrastructure, which had not been adequately winterized, resulted in exceedingly high prices for natural gas. Some gas compressor stations lost power when utilities began shutdowns, and overall gas supply fell by 85%.

From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis

[dreamcompiler]

One related thing that happened was that when the rolling blackouts started, the power companies had a list of critical customers that should not be cut off like hospitals, police stations, etc. Unfortunately some natural gas pumping stations were not on that list (or were on the list but were ignored), so they got cut off. Which of course created a positive feedback loop.

[pravus]

Look at the dip in Permian versus Haynesville, Eagle Ford, Barnett and Fayetteville. Permian is West Texas where I said I was and it didn't even dip below the previous low. East Texas is a whole other country...

[neilknowsbest]

The stacked line chart [1] of daily production by basin on the wiki page is very misleading. Following through to the source EIA data [2] and comparing Feb 2021 against Jan and March 2021 shows permian production down 19% from "average", the biggest decrease of the reported basins. The other basins you mentioned were between 13 and 18% below their "average". Of course this is a pretty big extrapolation from a monthly average number...

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Natural_gas_production_an... [2] - https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/natural-gas/where-our-na...