World’s Largest Sustainable Portable LNG Project
For the past couple of months, Aptos traffic along Soquel Drive between Rio Del Mar Blvd and Aptos Village has often been a matter of stop and go. During the day traffic lights were often taken out of service and traffic control conducted by workers in orange jackets with red stop signs. In many places holes were dug in the streets with sheets of steel replacing the pavement.
When we asked Rob Morse, PG&E Division Manager for Monterey, Santa Cruz and San Benito Counties about the project, we learned that this wasn’t your ordinary every day “Dig ‘em up and lay ‘em down again” type of operation. We were actually in the middle of making history!
According to Morse this is, as far as is known, the largest single use of Liquefied Natural Gas/ Compressed Natural Gas (LNG/CNG) for this type of project. The LNG/CNG was trucked in huge containers from a facility near Bakersfield to a gas injection point (shown in the Photos) near Felton. The purpose of all this was to safety test PG&E’s main gas transmission line in the county.
Donald Cutler of PG&E communications sent us this explanation:
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Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) completed pipeline safety pressure tests in the Santa Cruz region this summer, which required the company to take the region’s primary natural gas transmission line temporarily out of service.
In order to maintain safe and uninterrupted gas service for more than 54,000 customers during these tests, PG&E launched a Liquefied Natural Gas/ Compressed Natural Gas (LNG/CNG) support program unparalleled in scope. Over the course of the project, PG&E safely injected more than three and one half million pounds of LNG into the system.
The LNG/CNG project provided customers with access to safe, reliable and affordable service as PG&E conducts two hydrostatic pressure tests on the primary transmission pipeline serving the region. Hydrostatic pressure testing is an industry-standard safety procedure that tests the strength of pipelines using pressurized water. During the test, pipes were exposed to significantly higher pressure than their normal operating pressure. This enables PG&E to detect and safely repair potential issues before they happen. The sections successfully passed the pressure tests.
Because the testing requires that the pipe be temporarily taken out of service, the use of LNG is one of the only ways to keep gas flowing to customers, explains Austin Hastings, senior manager for PG&E’s LNG/CNG Operations.
“This was a major project and our 89-person team is proud to be a part of the pipeline safety work in the area. Both LNG and CNG resources provide PG&E with added flexibility to maintain service as vital safety work is conducted. However, unlike the normal delivery of natural gas through the transmission and distribution pipeline system, these resources must be safely transported via trailer to an injection site. During the Santa Cruz project, trailers made nearly constant deliveries to injection sites in the region, traveling 119,700 miles — a distance that would allow you to circle the globe nearly five times,” Hastings explained.
Due to the complexity of this project, the LNG/CNG team safely tested the system for 48 hours prior to relying upon it to ensure customers wouldn’t be affected. The 89-person team includes technicians, supervisors, support personnel, and drivers and loaders who ran five portable compressors, 32 tankers, and three vaporizers. PG&E also supported a number of other customers directly with CNG resources during testing.
This critical safety project was completed without any disruption to customer’s natural gas service.
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There you have it, sometimes making history can be inconvenient, but it’s almost over … we hope.