America's oceans are open for oil drilling! But why not Lake Michigan?

[IsailedawayfromFR]

What I mean is that the state govt is claiming some of the gas under the state to be released in emergency situations. Natural gas is important to industry and farming. Releasing it into the market amid a serious price spike will help weather the storm. What I don't like hearing is people suggesting the feds can tell us that we can't hold it in reserve but the fed can.

Michigan has been producing natural gas on an industrial scale since the 1920s I believe. I remember reading a story about them building an interstate highway bridge here and had a gas blowout when they drove a piling into a gas pocket.

So the state controls some gas wells or storage that it can quickly open up if there is a natural gas spike?

First I heard of this.  Do you know the volume of storage or delivery capacity here?

[IsailedawayfromFR]

Just not off the  coast of Florida.   The tourist industry is worth more.

So people in Florida would rather go to the beach than to have electricity in their houses or drive their cars?

That's odd.  Are you certain the beaches are worth that much?

[thackney]

What I mean is that the state govt is claiming some of the gas under the state to be released in emergency situations.

@Cripplecreek

Are you thinking of Natural Gas Storage?  Natural Gas that has already be produced from a reservoir, gone through a Natural Gas Processing Plant removing liquids and other contaminants, then pumped back into the ground for storage?

[Cripplecreek]

@Cripplecreek

Are you thinking of Natural Gas Storage?  Natural Gas that has already be produced from a reservoir, gone through a Natural Gas Processing Plant removing liquids and other contaminants, then pumped back into the ground for storage?

I believe they just locked in at a low price

[IsailedawayfromFR]

I believe they just locked in at a low price

Locking in the price of something is not a guarantee that it can be delivered when needed.

One must have some physical mechanism to deliver that gas from a supplier to a purchaser.  Supply must come from natural gas storage or a shut-in field and it must come at a high enough gas rate.

[thackney]

I believe they just locked in at a low price

If you can find a link, I would appreciate it.  I haven't found anything searching.

The catch is Nat Gas from the well doesn't go straight to the distribution system.

Raw Nat Gas goes through initial separation to cut liquids, but is still to wet and typically too contaminated to sell.  It will have CO, CO2, N2, H2S, water, NatGas liquids, etc that make it out of specification.  It goes to a Gas Plant to get cleaned up, profitable liquids like Ethane, Butane, etc are sold separately.  The NatGas, now at Pipeline Spec, goes into the transmission and distribution systems for end users.

It price spike times like the Northeast earlier this year are because of bottlenecks in the delivery system to the end user.  The demand spikes due to temperature, or the supply crashes due to failure.  In either case, any amount of gas as a reserve in a reservoir is of no help.  It cannot get past the bottleneck to help supply demand.

[thackney]

I believe they just locked in at a low price

Perhaps this is what you are remembering?

http://www.michigan.gov/mpsc/0,4639,7-159-16385_59482-424546--,00.html#tab=Storage

Michigan's gas storage is also useful as an alternative supply in an emergency. For example, in the spring of 1951, floods washed out a section of Michigan Wisconsin Pipeline Company's (now ANR Pipeline Company) pipeline in Kansas, shutting off its supply to Michigan for about a week. While it was being replaced, storage fields near Austin supplied Michigan's and Wisconsin's gas needs.

Michigan's storage also serves as a way of shifting summer supply to the winter. In the late 1940s demand for natural gas in Michigan grew faster than pipelines could be built to meet it. When a gas shortage occurred in Michigan in 1947, Consumers Energy (then Consumers Power) injected propane from 1,200 railroad tank cars into Michigan Gas Storage Company (then a new affiliated company) storage fields during the summer to prevent service interruptions the following winter.

All but two of Michigan's 55 storage fields were once producing fields. They are located throughout Michigan's lower peninsula. They were converted to storage (the first in 1941) by drilling more wells and building pipeline facilities and compressor stations. Unlike producing fields, gas storage fields are designed such that their entire production can be cycled in and out of the field each year. The geologic structures that make up storage fields in Michigan have a high porosity, which makes them among the best in North America.

[IsailedawayfromFR]

Perhaps this is what you are remembering?

 The geologic structures that make up storage fields in Michigan have a high porosity, which makes them among the best in North America.

These gas storage fields in Michigan are quite different than what we have down here along the Gulf Coast.

Among other things I was involved in during my industry days, I had to analyze gas storage in both places.  The storage along the coast is mostly pretty simple as they are leeched-out salt domes where the gas is stored at essentially 100% porosity like a giant tank.  They are pressured up with gas and emptied by nothing more than pressure cycles at tremendously high rates.  One storage facility I am familiar with had a single well, stored 7 bcf of gas, and could be emptied with that one well in 7 days.

The ones in Michigan I reviewed are in fact old gas fields, but what makes them unique is they are water-drive reservoirs where the gas was watered out.  After depletion, these fields are reinjected at high gas pressures.  When the gas is needed, the gas is delivered without any decrease in pressure as the water drive maintains high pressure.  It does take more wells and these wells produce at far less rates than the Gulf Coast variety where the 'reservoir' has infinite permeability.

Both cases require gas compression to create storage, but only the Gulf Coast needs significant gas injection to deliver it from storage.

The other item is that storage losses can be greater in the Michigan fields as some gas is invariably trapped with the gas and will not be ever produced as it remains residual.

[thackney]

These gas storage fields in Michigan are quite different than what we have down here along the Gulf Coast.

Actually, we have both.  I helped expand several times a depleted Natural Gas Storage Facility on the SW side of Houston that was an old depleted field.  At the end, we could withdraw 1.2 Billion cubic feet per day.  The problem with the depleted field over the caverns is they pick up more water in the ground that has to be separated out before returning to the pipeline system.

Nationally, the fields are more than 10 times greater capacity than the caverns.

https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/ng_stor_type_s1_m.htm

But even in Texas, we have 3 times as much capacity in depleted fields than in caverns for natural gas storage.

http://www.rrc.state.tx.us/media/34566/gsd-gas-storage-report-062016.pdf

These days, I work at the "King" of cavern storage, Mont Belvieu, but that is mostly for Natural Gas Liquid storage.

http://www.ogj.com/articles/print/volume-112/issue-6/speical-report-worldwide-gas-processing/what-s-at-mont-belvieu.html

[IsailedawayfromFR]

Actually, we have both.  I helped expand several times a depleted Natural Gas Storage Facility on the SW side of Houston that was an old depleted field.  At the end, we could withdraw 1.2 Billion cubic feet per day.  The problem with the depleted field over the caverns is they pick up more water in the ground that has to be separated out before returning to the pipeline system.

Nationally, the fields are more than 10 times greater capacity than the caverns.

https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/ng_stor_type_s1_m.htm

But even in Texas, we have 3 times as much capacity in depleted fields than in caverns for natural gas storage.

http://www.rrc.state.tx.us/media/34566/gsd-gas-storage-report-062016.pdf

These days, I work at the "King" of cavern storage, Mont Belvieu, but that is mostly for Natural Gas Liquid storage.

http://www.ogj.com/articles/print/volume-112/issue-6/speical-report-worldwide-gas-processing/what-s-at-mont-belvieu.html

MY main emphasis was to differentiate between depletion drive storage and water drive storage, not between fields and man-created caverns.

The GC fields I am familiar with are mostly are also depletion drive fields, not water drive fields.  As such, they operate more like the caverns ie pressure depletion, needing compressors, rather than the water drives which do not.  In some ways they are better than caverns as they have a geologically-made 'seal' which prevent escape of stored gas; in other ways, they are not as good as they do not have infinite permeability so must have more wells to both inject gas and to produce it.