The Oil Drum | The Denver gas situation

45 comments on The Denver gas situation

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

TrueKaiser on February 21, 2006 - 6:34pm

so your saying the freezing story was a cover story rather then admiting a sudden production shortfall?

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

Leanan on February 21, 2006 - 6:39pm

I honestly don't know. The Denver Post paints a much more complex picture:

Mechanical malfunctions, inaccurate weather forecasts and inadequate natural-gas supplies caused the rolling power outages that afflicted 325,000 customers of Xcel Energy on Saturday.
It marked the first time in Xcel's institutional memory that controlled electrical outages occurred in the winter.
Such disruptions typically happen on the hottest summer days when demand for power peaks.
Three outages of 30 minutes each hit customers in portions of metro Denver, Grand Junction and the central mountains. The outages lasted longer than 30 minutes for about 25,000 customers.
"The phrase 'perfect storm' is overworked, but we've never seen events like this," said Xcel spokesman Mark Stutz.
Portions of three coal-fired power plants in Colorado were out of commission Saturday morning, either for scheduled maintenance or because of mechanical breakdowns.
In addition, Xcel had inadequate supplies of natural gas on hand because initial weather forecasts had not suggested the record-breaking low of minus 13 on Saturday.
The utility had enough natural gas for all of its customers' heating needs, but it ran short of the fuel to supply gas-fired power generators that supplement the electricity produced by coal-fired power plants.
The gas shortage was exacerbated by an undetermined number of Rocky Mountain natural-gas wells whose pumping equipment froze, preventing additional deliveries.

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

kkinder on February 22, 2006 - 2:51am

The idea that one natural gas production equipment failure could cause Xcel to need to take down the grid would make sense ONLY if there were very little spare supply.

Also, this stuff about 30 minute blackouts isn't terribly accurate. It was more like 45 minutes to an hour. And it wasn't until later in the day that the cause, a natural gas shortage, made it into the media.

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

Stormy on February 21, 2006 - 6:54pm

It is not gas that may have froze, but water condensation that slowly built up. Eventually the passage for the gas narrowed. Until that passage was cleared, getting gas to the customer became more difficult. (That is how I understood the "freezing.")

However, the story did mention a shortfall, as well as the freezing.

Someone from Denver should address this issue.

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

Leanan on February 21, 2006 - 7:01pm

As I understand it, there should be no water in the natural gas at that point. They have hundreds of dehydrators at each wellhead, as well as other ways to remove water and anything else that might freeze.

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

Gets IT on February 22, 2006 - 5:56am

There usually is only 1 to 3 dehydrators to a field, which could have many wells, often up to 50 miles away from the last well in the gathering network. I worked a gathering system in south Texas for a field of 860 wells. We had 3 dehydrators at the 3 outlets from the gathering system network all about 50-60 miles distant from eachother. The wells had enough pressure to flow to those outlet points by themselves, but required a number of 1500 HP compressors to kick up the pressure enough to get into the intrastate gas transmission company's lateral lines. That's where we put the compressors. Compressors and flow meters can't take liquid slugs, so all liquids had to be knocked out beforehand. After the liquids are out, you can run the gas through a scrubber to eliminate the H2S (if you have any of that nasty stuff), then dehydrate the rest of the gas stream, compress it and lastly, meter the flow to the transmission company, so it was much more convenient to minimize the installation all of that equipment to the fewest number of places as possible.

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

45 comments on The Denver gas situation

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

Beware email scams!

Beware email scams claiming to be from this site. We do not have any job openings. If anyone contacts you about a job at The Oil Drum, do not reply to them, and definitely do not give them any personal information or send them money. Read more here.