Recent cold snap nearly caused a natural gas emergency

The state’s largest communities in Southcentral Alaska were near a natural gas emergency during the recent cold snap when temperatures dropped to -25 degrees F or below in some locations, utility officials told state officials in briefings Feb. 8 and Feb 9.

“In the years I’ve been here I’ve never seen the system under such strain,” said John Sims, CEO of Enstar Natural Gas Co., the state’s largest gas utility.

The situation was compounded by technical difficulties in wells that produce gas from a large storage facility near Kenai, south of Anchorage.

This was of grave concern because Anchorage and other communities in the region depend on natural gas for space heating and gas also fuels a majority of electric generation. About half of Alaska’s population live in communities served by Enstar.

Sims said two of five wells at the Cook Inlet Natural Gas Storage Alaska, or CINGSA, facility experienced problems that reduced the ability to withdraw gas by 30 percent. Enstar was unable to find a repair crew during the cold weather. A contractor has now been located to do the work, Sims said.

Sims spoke along with other utilities including Matanuska Electric Association, or MEA, and Cook Inlet producing companies to the House Energy Committee and a joint session of the House and Senate Resources committees in Juneau last week, on Feb. 5 and 6.

There are now plans to create more backup gas “deliverability” at CINGSA with two more gas producing wells to be drilled. Work will start this summer, Sims said, and this will increase the number of producer wells from five to seven. Enstar is the operator and part-owner of CINGSA.

As cold weather continued through late January the situation became more dire. Daily meetings began between utility managers including Matanuska Electric Association and including Hilcorp Energy, the Inlet’s major gas producer.

Sims told the House Energy Committee that at one point so much gas had been withdrawn from storage at CINGSA that only 10 million cubic feet of deliverability was left, meaning the tank was almost empty.

What was very worrisome was the danger that more problems could develop with gas producing wells. When the first of the CINGSA wells developed problems the gas deliverability, or withdrawal rate, dropped from about 150 million cubic feet per day to 121.5 million cubic feet per day, Sims told the legislators.

That is about a 19 percent drop that could be managed, but when problems hit the second well the deliverability dropped to 105 million cubic feet per day, approximately a 30 percent decline. “At that point, all of us became very concerned,” Sims said. Enstar began checking the wells at CINGSA every 15 minutes.

Hilcorp Energy, which also operates storage facilities for its customers, agreed to provide backup gas to Enstar above the gas company’s current contracted gas purchase volumes at no extra cost, Luke Saugier, Hilcorp’s senior vice president for Alaska, told legislators. “We felt this was the right thing to do,” Saugier said.

There were other continencies in place. MEA has backup diesel-powered generators at its Eklutna power plant, and had put plant operators on notice to be able to fire them up. This would have reduced MEA’s own reliance on gas, making it available to Enstar. However, this turned out to not be needed.

Similarly, Golden Valley Electric Association, the Fairbanks-based electric cooperative for the Interior, was prepared to generate more power with its oil-fired plant at North Pole and send power south to Mat-Su and Anchorage on the electric intertie that connects the Interior with Southcentral Alaska.

Again, this was a contingency that turned out not to be needed.

Chugach Electric Association, the state’s largest power cooperative, was in a somewhat more secure position because it owns a part of the Beluga gas field on the west side of Cook Inlet and can supply 60 percent of its fuel needs for generation with its own gas, Arthur Miller, Chugach’s CEO, told legislators in the hearings.

Energy conservation played a part, too. At the point of lowest-temperatures Gov. Mike Dunleavy called the commanding officer at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson to ask for thermostats in buildings to be turned down, the governor’s office confirmed.

“He (Dunleavy) spoke to the base commander and asked that the thermostats on base be set at 65 degrees and to unplug devices that don’t need to be plugged in all the time. The commander agreed with the request,” said Jeff Turner, Dunleavy’s spokesman.

The governor also ordered a lowering of thermostats in state-owned buildings in the Southcentral region.

It’s not yet known how much gas these measure save, but they did help.

Sims told legislators in the hearings that there are procedures in place for the utilities to ask the public for voluntary conservation measures but the step was not taken because experience in other states shows that this can sometimes be counterproductive.

In one instance, when consumers in New Mexico, during a cold weather snap, were asked to turn down the heat it had the opposite effect. People instead turned up thermostats, increasing the draw on gas supplies and worsening the problem, Sims said.