The Logistics of Natural Gas | Wendover Productions

An American household is typically delivered two physical goods as utilities. The first is water, and the ability to turn on a tap and reliably have fresh, clean water year-round, no matter recent precipitation, is undoubtedly impressive. But a water utility is typically a fairly local service.

Except in a few fascinating exceptions, water tends to be gathered from a natural source, processed, and delivered to households fairly nearby. It's a fairly intuitive, fairly straightforward process that has been going on, in some form, for hundreds, even thousands of years.

Natural gas, though? That's a modern marvel. The general rule, across the world, is that natural gas production happens where people are not.

This is, in part, a happenstance of geography, in part the consequence of an aversion to proximity to production, but what it means is that gas often has to travel hundreds, if not thousands of miles, to get to its end user. To get low-density, flammable gas across an entire continent is far from easy, and it's

even harder to do so profitably. Whereas gasoline and other liquid fuels are dense enough that the cost of transport to the end-user by truck is marginal relative to the overall cost, the same is not true for natural gas.

Therefore, through time, what has turned the previously worthless gas into a profitable commodity was figuring out how to make the transport economics work. And the answer for that was pipelines—really, really long ones. Taking the example of an end-user in Basalt, Colorado, their town's local network hooks

up to a larger transmission pipeline that follows the area's highway down the valley until around here. Under this golf course, this dead-end offshoot connects with the long-distance transmission pipelines spanning across Colorado.

Now, the fact that this happens under a golf course demonstrates something important. The pipeline operator does not own the land through which the pipeline passes. Rather, they own the right for the pipeline to pass through others' land—they own an easement.

When a pipeline is constructed, the company negotiates with landowners to purchase the easement, or, if negotiations don't go well, acquires it through eminent domain. In exchange, the landowner gets paid a lump sum more or less equivalent to the reduction in property value caused by the new easement.

After all, the property value will be lower. Not only will buyers be wary of living near a pipeline due to the low but non-zero risk of an accident, but easements also come with restrictions on what one can do with the land. Typically, you can't build any buildings, you can't plant any trees, you really can

only have pavement, grass, or dirt. The operator needs to be able to access the pipeline for maintenance and repair at any time so they can't have a permanent structure in the way. And these easements are legally binding for eternity—they are baked in with a property's

so buyers must still abide by the restrictions agreed upon by the original seller. Here, the adjacent housing development is laid out in a way to avoid the largely invisible right-of-way, then on the other side of the river, the right-of-way slides between buildings, barely even visible from a satellite view.

But as the hills start, the right-of-way takes its more typical form—a 50-foot-wide stretch of land devoid of trees. And that lack of trees originates, of course, from construction. That process is fairly straightforward.

First, heavy machinery is used to dig a trench. Then, sections of pipe are laid out next to the trench, and a pipe bending machine comes through to bend the pipe to follow the topography. Next, these shorter sections are welded together into longer sections, and the welds are strictly

inspected. After all, structural integrity is critically necessary to prevent an incident. Once complete, they'll place these long sections in the trench on sandbags to prevent damage to their protective coating, then soft, rock-free dirt is placed to directly surround the pipe,

followed by the previously removed dirt to fill the rest of the trench. From there, the crews test the pipe by filling it with water and pressurizing it well beyond its normal operating pressure, and that's about it. Pipeline construction is relatively straightforward and moves relatively fast.

Under the right conditions, crews can install upward of a mile of pipe a day, often across quite remote environments. But there is more to pipeline construction than just constructing the pipe. After all, if you put natural gas into a pipeline in Texas, it doesn't just magically

flow to Colorado. That's why you need this—a compressor station. As the name implies, these are the facilities that compress the gas, and it's this pressure that propels the gas forward through the pipeline at a speed of about 25 miles or 40

kilometers per hour. But they're also important for making the economics work. An average household uses about 200 cubic feet of natural gas a day. That's a lot of volume of gas.

It'd fill up a 6 foot or 2 meter cube, or the volume of about 10 fridges. The economics of transporting this gas would never work if it were done at its natural density. That's why they compress it—quite a lot, in fact, between 500 and 1400 pounds per

square inch, allowing a pipeline to be used far more efficiently. These compressor stations are also often home to so-called pig launchers, which are more humane than they sound. That's because these are what are referred to as pigs—devices placed into the pipeline

to perform some function. Some pigs clean the pipeline, whereas others are smart pigs fitted with sensors to inspect it for any vulnerabilities. While less relevant in natural gas pipelines, operators will even use pigs to separate out

two different products moving through a pipeline. They might send a batch of traditional vehicle fuel, then a pig, then a batch of jet fuel, for example. And wherever there's a pig launcher, there's also a pig catcher that's able to remove

the device from the pipeline while still allowing product to flow.