Watts Up With That?
Plunging Natural Gas Supply Shows Texas Still Not Ready for Cold
By Gerson Freitas Jr, Francesca Maglione, and Sergio Chapa
January 3, 2022, 12:06 PM CST Corrected January 6, 2022, 1:18 PM CSTTexas’s natural gas industry had almost a year to prepare for last weekend’s cold blast and avoid another loss of production. But yet again, instruments froze, output plunged and companies spewed a miasma of pollutants into the atmosphere in a bid to keep operations stable.
Though Saturday’s cold front wasn’t as severe as the February storm that killed hundreds and knocked out power to much of the state, nearly 1 million cubic feet of gas was burned or wasted due to weather-related shutdowns, according to filings with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. At the same time, production plunged to the lowest level since the last freeze, BloombergNEF data shows.
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The article includes this eye-popping graphic:
