Texas s top oil and gas regulators voted Tuesday to define who will be at the top of the list to keep receiving electricity during severe winter weather, ending an earlier draft loophole that critics said would have let any operator pay just $150 to opt out of expensive upgrades.
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The Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates the oil and gas industry with what critics call a light touch, unanimously voted to adopt rules breaking the state s 131,000 leases that produce 28.7 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day. The facility won't be allowed to opt out of winterization requirements because of the strictest designation dubbed supercritical. The label is expected to apply to an assortment of pipelines, processing plants, storage terminals, and more than 19,000 leases that produce more than 23 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day, according to Commissioner Jim Wright.
That represents more than the amount of gas we need in Texas on any given day to send to people's homes and power generation, Wright said during the commission hearing.
Texas had a year to prepare for Winter, and it's still not ready for Winter.
A second designation includes tens of thousands of leases with older marginal wells that collectively produce 1% of the state's natural gas supply, and will be exempt from the winter infrastructure rules. The third group falls somewhere between supercritical and marginal. Operators in a group that want to opt out of the winter rules will have to pay $150 application fee and provide evidence of why they need to be exempt, according to the rules adopted Tuesday.
The rulemaking clears up an earlier confusion in draft text that suggested a gas operator could opt out of winterization rules. After a freak February storm that claimed more than 200 lives and left millions without electricity for days, the apparent loophole had both elected officials and citizens in arms, especially after efforts to beef up storm preparations during the legislative session to beef up storm-preparation.
There is nobody in the legislature, the administration, the ERCOT, the PUC and the Railroad Commission of Texas that has a desire to fix every problem possible and make sure this does not happen, as stated by Wayne Christian, Chairman of the Railroad Commission.
The Public Utility Commission of Texas has adopted a rule that requires critical natural gas facilities to provide information to a utility from which it receives electric service in order to allow power providers to prioritize service to gas providers during an emergency.
There is still lingering fear going into the winter season despite the changes adopted Tuesday.
We are glad that the staff and commission listened to reason and reduced the number of companies allowed to opt out of doing their part to protect our grid. In an emailed statement, Luke Metzger, executive director for Environment Texas, said that this rule gives too many gas companies a free pass to avoid requirements.
Now that the classification rules have been established, a mapping process to decide which of the state s hundreds of thousands of wells, half a million miles of pipe and thousands of facilities fit into which of the three categories will start - a process that regulators have to complete by September 2022. Only then will actual winterization rules be developed for those facilities, a process that can take up to six months. That means that this winter, and possibly next, won't have any winterization requirements for the gas sector, even for supercritical sites.
In a phone interview, I think they put more thought into the final rule than the draft, said Virginia Palacios, executive director of the watchdog group Commission Shift. We're still in trouble this winter. One Chemical Company is reaping the benefits after all the Wildfires Are Getting Worse, and None of the Wildfires Are Getting Worse.