Natural gas crunch leaves thousands shivering in Southwest

[phantom power]

SANTA FE, New Mexico (Reuters) – Thousands of New Mexicans and others across the Southwest were left huddling against bitter cold on Thursday after supplies of natural gas were cut off to their communities.

Frigid weather throughout the region knocked out natural gas production equal to nearly 5 percent of daily nationwide demand as wells froze and plunging temperatures caused problems for processing plants.

The crunch was exacerbated by unusually high heating demands. Production at the wellhead was shut off at facilities across Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110204/us_nm/us_newmexico_natgas

[TwilightGardener]

1. That's insane--I'd be livid if I paid my gas bills and they cut me off just

when I needed heat the most. And then have frozen pipes and damage...:mad:

[atreides1]

2. Heard from friends in Tucson

Water pipes and gas lines were bursting...plants dying from the extreme cold...it's a mess.

[HereSince1628]

3. The production stopped due to storms...

Reserve capacity is something of a dream nowadays where storing inventory is seen as a wasteful cost.

This is what happens to efficiencies of scale the subsystems supporting all those eggs in one basket breakdown.

[TwilightGardener]

5. I'm just north of New Mexico, in southern CO--we're bitter cold, too, and yet I've got plenty of

heat and electricity. New Mexico conceivably could get very cold, a lot of it is high elevation. The gas co's are acting like they've never had a cold snap.

[HereSince1628]

6. The article said that weather stopped production...

I can't speak to why gas fields in one place would have problems while others don't.

I do know that companies avoid storage of inventory because storage is a cost and all costs need to be externalized.

[OnlinePoker]

7. Nonsense.

The past 2 years, the storage at the beginning of the heating season has been at record levels. Even as of last weeks report, storage in the West Region was higher than the 5 year average. This has been a colder winter in the lower 48 than normal, but storage is right on the average amount for this time of year.

http://ir.eia.gov/ngs/ngs.html

[HereSince1628]

8. Those appear to be estimates of national availability

rather than availability in the afflicted area.

Not being an expert in NG distribution I can't really interpret their meaning to specific areas in New Mexico.

Perhaps you are an expert and can tell the rest of us just what reserves were available to the afflicted area and how they might be affected by production stops, including the rate of depletion of available reserve?

[Ryano42]

4. I suspect we have been ENRON'ed

Our new wingnut governor is in Deep with Texas energy.

It's been this cold here before without this COLLAPSE.