Mo’ Pain with Propane

Polar vortex, meet your maker, global warming… that mass of warm “up there” that pushed your mass of cold “down here.” But as cold freezes more than aspirations, it also generates high demand for the very thing that caused this mess in the first place: fossil fuels that burn to keep us warm. And one particularly bilious supply source – propane (a little benefit extracted in natural gas production and crude oil refining) is in dangerously short supply. Where folks don’t have natural gas lines to their properties, but need the benefits of gas for cooking and heating, propane has long since been the answer.

From Hawaii to the San Juan island communities to isolated farms from Alabama to the Dakotas and Iowa, propane tanks are the “gas heat” solution to millions of Americans, for their homes, businesses and farms. But demand from Mr. Vortex has kicked up the price by $2/gallon since November, and there still isn’t enough to meet demand. Nobody expected this cold front to reach deep intro communities not remotely used to such extreme weather conditions.

“Even while production of the fuel is up 15 percent over a year ago, inventories are now nearly 50 percent lower than last winter, and many Southerners and Midwesterners who depend on the fuel are angry and confused.

“In North and South Dakota, the shortage has become so acute that the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe has opened shelters to serve its population, most of whom rely on propane. Several states have moved to help ease delivery problems, and a number of attorneys general have called for investigations into price gouging…

“‘You don’t design church for Easter Sunday,’ said Clifton Linton, a natural gas liquids specialist at the Oil Price Information Service. ‘Well, guess what happened this year? In the Midwest, it was a double Easter Sunday.’… Still, he added, the problem is one of logistics rather than production.

“The higher price for propane, according to the experts, is the consequence of three principal factors, including frigid weather over the past two months that has led to a surge of demand…In addition, five times as much propane was used to dry corn in recent months because of a bumper crop of wet corn last year, the result of heavy rains at the end of the growing season.

“Meanwhile, American propane exports exceeded 400,000 barrels a day for the first time in October, according to a recent report by the consultants RBN Energy, helped along by booming domestic production and the completion of several port dock expansions. Propane exports have been steadily rising from about 150,000 barrels a day in January 2012.” New York Times, February 8^th.

Our “energy independence” potential is growing day-by-day as we now extract more oil and gas than we have in decades. Thank you “fracking technology.” OK, fracking (using chemically-treated, pressurized water to “open” fossil fuel reserves “below”) has had a few nasty side effects from triggering earthquakes to tainting once potable underground water supplies. We are sucking down all forms of energy to keep warm, even as electric power lines succumb to ice and snow damage capable of pulling entire grids down. What does it take to wake up the country about the need for alternative fuels?

Do you know, for example, that solar electricity-generating panels work a whole lot more efficiently when they are cold? OK, they get less sun exposure in the winter, and they stop functioning when snow and ice cover their silicon cells, but summer heat – any heat – reduces their output. It’s the sun’s light that creates the photovoltaic effect, not its warmth. We need more.

And there are even more reasons to create many more “localized” power-generating capacities. Logistics in moving energy from point A to point B through Z are vulnerable to Mother Nature’s wrath plus the not-so-illusory risk of having hard targets with huge regional and national impact-potential beckoning terrorists to wreak the havoc they so want to spread.

A story that has been buried (for national security reasons) since the event took place in California’s Silicon Valley area last April suggests how truly vulnerable we are. Perhaps it was a test run for something worse… or maybe just a dare gone very extreme. But a group of well-trained, masked snipers descended on an unmanned San Jose electrical power station and opened fire. When the shooting stopped, 17 transformers and 6 circuit breakers were seriously damaged or destroyed. Over $15 million in damage. The power went out for moment until backup systems rerouted the grid to make up for the damage. The snipers escaped… and we still don’t have a clue who they were.

There’s a big picture that comes from the aggregation of social costs, terrorist targets, contamination and pollution and the unbelievably huge impact of climate change from all of these “little-to-big” stories that define global energy usage. And if America cannot lead in finding a solution, because it is one of the biggest sources of the problem, exactly how does humanity get a handle on this mass movement toward self-destruction? Or do we?

I’m Peter Dekom, and the ringing alarm clock from our wake-up call is slowly running out of juice.