A growing number of cities are looking at restricting the use of gas in new buildings to reduce climate emissions. But some states are considering laws to block those efforts, with backing from the natural gas industry. Today, NPR science correspondent Dan Charles takes us on a tour of three cities where this is playing out.
The extreme shortage of natural gas that has idled thousands of workers across the eastern United States worsened yesterday, although some factories reopened by switching to alternative fuels.
The National Fuel Gas Corporation in Buffalo, which had previously escaped cutbacks, announced that following new curtailments by its suppliers it was eliminating service to, schools and industrial customers. HoweVer, the company said later that it would permit industrial customers to resume use of natural gas today, but at reduced volume.
The nation's four major automobile manufacturers, which had furloughed 56,000 employees on Monday, reduced the cuts to 20,000 by late yesterday afternoon.
And as the record cold of Monday eased, electric companies in Ohio and Michigan as well as across the Southeast were able to restart frozen generators and end rotating blackouts.
A lot of people are talking about the power shortage down south. But in January 1977, Buffalo through Detroit had a shortage of both electricity and natural gas due an extended period of cold that shuttered factories and lead to mandated cuts to building heat to 55 degrees.
In a squat rig fitted with a 5,000-gallon tank, Peter crisscrosses the expanse of farms and woods near the Ohio/West Virginia/Pennsylvania border, the heart of a region that produces close to one-third of America’s natural gas. He hauls a salty substance called “brine,” a naturally occurring waste product that gushes out of America’s oil-and-gas wells to the tune of nearly 1 trillion gallons a year, enough to flood Manhattan, almost shin-high, every single day. At most wells, far more brine is produced than oil or gas, as much as 10 times more. It collects in tanks, and like an oil-and-gas garbage man, Peter picks it up and hauls it off to treatment plants or injection wells, where it’s disposed of by being shot back into the earth.
One day in 2017, Peter pulled up to an injection well in Cambridge, Ohio. A worker walked around his truck with a hand-held radiation detector, he says, and told him he was carrying one of the “hottest loads” he’d ever seen. It was the first time Peter had heard any mention of the brine being radioactive.
The Earth’s crust is in fact peppered with radioactive elements that concentrate deep underground in oil-and-gas-bearing layers. This radioactivity is often pulled to the surface when oil and gas is extracted — carried largely in the brine.
In the popular imagination, radioactivity conjures images of nuclear meltdowns, but radiation is emitted from many common natural substances, usually presenting a fairly minor risk. Many industry representatives like to say the radioactivity in brine is so insignificant as to be on par with what would be found in a banana or a granite countertop, so when Peter demanded his supervisor tell him what he was being exposed to, his concerns were brushed off; the liquid in his truck was no more radioactive than “any room of your home,” he was told. But Peter wasn’t so sure.
You often see these trucks with highly compressed natural gas on the roads, which help natural gas companies overcome pipeline limitations which put cost constraints on the movement of gas. They're has been a number of these trucks that have been in crashes in recent years, although so far there has not been a major explosion or release of gas from the trucks.