Over and over again we heard that the facility where there was a fire last week accounted for 64% of the utility's supply of natural gas to its customers in Michigan. And we're still hearing that today in some reports. Unfortunately, this isn't really true. It's unnecessarily alarming.
The Ray field at Macomb has 41 billion cubic feet of stored natural gas, as only The Detroit News noted at the time, but during a normal winter when Consumers Energy pumps 2.5 billion cubic feet a day, the utility is supplying 150 billion cubic feet in two months' time. It can't all come from Macomb's storage, obviously. It's piped in from all over to be compressed at Macomb and at other stations. The problem isn't the supply, just as the utility indeed kept emphasizing, stating in various reports that Consumers has 300-350 billion cubic feet of stored gas. The problem was too much of the utility's compressor capability (64%) is centralized at Macomb, which they didn't want to emphasize when it suddenly went off-line automatically in the wake of the fire. Examine the news accounts and you will see that the reporters simplistically characterized these details and misled the public.
C
ritics of Consumers Energy's paltry $3 million in infrastructure spending over the last five years have a point. This utility in Michigan is notorious for spending more dark money than any other to influence politics. Now that they've had this fire, they'll have to spend more on infrastructure, but it remains for Consumers Energy to install more redundancy in its system to prevent against what happened last week. But don't hold your breath. The utility is as unlikely to do what is best for Michigan as reporters are likely suddenly to become more intelligent.
God forbid we have an EMP. I doubt any of this infrastructure would function properly after such an event, redundancy or no.
That's what alarms me.
On Wednesday night, as temperatures dropped to -43 degrees with the wind chill, Consumers Energy sent an emergency message to Michiganders' cell phones asking them to turn down their thermostats to 65 degrees.
That followed a similar plea from Consumers Energy CEO Patti Poppe, who reported a Wednesday explosion that damaged a Consumers Energy facility that accounts for 64 percent of its supply. In a Facebook message, Poppe urged Michiganders to "protect the system" by turning down the heat.
But many Michiganders responded to Poppe's plea with defiance on social media during the emergency, frustrated with being asked to pay ever-increasing rates to a private company that essentially runs a monopoly.
The facility where there was a fire is a compressor facility tasked with the job of pressurizing natural gas for its pipeline network. The facility accounts for 64% of pressurized supply, not 64% of supply, a key detail still not reported clearly in the media, which at the time unnecessarily alarmed the public during a period of dangerous, bitter cold weather.
The Ray plant contributes a maximum of 64 percent of the company's daily average of 2.5 billion cubic feet of natural gas to customers. Before gas can be put into the pipeline system, however, it needs to be compressed. The Ray station sits above Consumers' largest underground natural gas storage area with a capacity of 41.2 billion cubic feet of storage. Overall, Ray can compress 117 million cubic feet of gas per day, reaching pressures of 1,800 pounds per square inch. ...
"Most of the damage was on plant two. We have plant one flowing and three mostly has heat-related damage. We are working on that now," [VP Garrick Rochow] said. "Plant three will take maybe three weeks to get back online. Plant two is more significant. It was closer to the fire and flames and heat. It looks like it originated there. It is out for the season, but not going to impact ability to deliver to customers."
The layout of the Ray facility, which was built out over time, is three separate buildings and three separate plants on the site at 69338 Omo Road, in Armada Township. Station No. 3, which was built in 2011, is the largest of the three.
"We don't know what activated the fire gate system," Rochow said. "We are looking at that. We do know that in the process of venting the gas that the natural gas caught fire. There was a fireball like in the pictures. As a precautionary measure, plant 1 and 2 were in operation and fire-gated. Personnel fire-gated the entire facility. When that occurred, probably 50 yards separated the buildings .... gas from plants one and two caught fire."
Rochow said it is unclear why automatic controls vented the system and how the gas caught fire. "We can see the sequence of events but still looking at the reasons," he said. ...
But Rochow said one lesson Consumers might have learned is that the plants might still be too close to one another, given the fact that venting of gas of all stations at the same time led to the fireball igniting everything at once.
"We have systems there and the proximity of the systems has eliminated (favorable) redundancy," he said. "We will learn from it and think about how investments can create more redundancy on that particular site."
