Brittle Power- PARTS 1-3 (+Notes) - Natural Capitalism Solutions

Chapter Nine: Oil and Gas 121escaping gas could cause fires and explosions....Careful pressure regulation isrequired in order for gas to be safe.” 172 (Centralia, Missouri found this out on28 January 1982 when an accidentally broken main put high-pressure gas intolow-pressure lines, causing dozens of simultaneous fires and explosions allover town. 173 ) Conversely, pressure reductions, besides putting out pilot lights,can cause damaging frost heaves near the regulator outlet pipe. 174This ability to wreak widespread havoc by remote control through changingdistribution pressures has no parallel in the oil system. The thousands ofprimary and tens of thousands of secondary oil terminals are vulnerable tosabotage, 175 and local oil transportation can also become a target. 176 However,such targets, unlike LNG and LPG cargoes, are unlikely to cause more thanlocally severe damage unless they endanger some larger target, such as a refinery,tank farm, or reactor, near the site of attack. That is not true of the naturalgas system. Its sensitivity to distribution pressure—together with its relianceon pipelines and its relatively limited storage—may exceed even that of the oilsystem, with its dispersed and diverse routes and with widespread bufferstocks spotted throughout the local distribution system. 177Gas grids appears, in partial compensation, to offer better opportunitiesthan oil pipelines for rerouting:In the last ten years, many additional interconnections have been added, to thepoint that, according to industry sources, there is hardly a crossing between twopipelines without an interconnection that could be used if needed. Compressionmight or might not be needed at interconnecting points to effect deliveries from aline operating at lower pressure than the receiving line, but in general, the technicalproblems of transferring natural gas within the pipeline network are reportedly notoverwhelming. From a practical standpoint, the United States has a natural gaspipeline “grid” which could be used to modify the directions and quantities of naturalgas flows substantially. 178How far this would remain true if key interconnections or control systemswere disrupted is open to considerable doubt, and in any case the inter-stategrid is fairly inflexible. 179 Nonetheless, processed natural gas, unlike oil (crudeor specific products), is a relatively homogenous commodity, one unit ofwhich is interchangeable for another within the grid.Total vulnerabilityBoth gas and oil grids have recently shown a new form of vulnerability:theft. As prices have risen, “oil rustling” and “gas tapping” have become bigbusiness, ranging from the hijacking of a twenty-five-thousand-gallon tank truckto the theft of hundreds of thousands of gallons from Wyoming fields. Perhaps