The natural gas explosions in Massachusetts last week have prompted questions about the age and vulnerability of the nation’s gas distribution system that delivers America’s most consumed fuel source.
Some environmental experts and advocates say the deadly gas explosions demonstrate the risks of fossil fuel infrastructure accidents, which are rare but high impact, and the need to transition faster to renewable energy sources.
“This is certainly a system level vulnerability that appears to have happened,” Nathan Phillips, a Boston University professor and environmental activist who studies gas leaks in pipelines, told the Washington Examiner. “This is a major, major extended disruption of a very key energy source: it’s your hot water and it’s what you use to cook, for most people in Massachusetts.”
Gas is inherently risky, Phillips noted, because it is combustible. Wind and solar power, by contrast, are naturally not explosive.
Others say the explosions in Massachusetts are unique and human-caused, highlighting the risk of old, leak-prone local gas distribution systems.
“Events like Massachusetts are extremely rare,” John Hughes, president and CEO of the Electricity Consumers Resource Council, a trade group representing large industrial consumers of energy, told the Washington Examiner. “It is not clear that it is an infrastructure issue or a lack of resiliency. It was probably some type of neglect or human error. All energy sources have vulnerabilities.”
The accident comes as President Trump, in advocating for subsidizing coal and nuclear power plants, has made the argument that large interstate gas pipelines are vulnerable to cyber and physical attacks from bad actors. Trump could use the incident as fodder for his argument, but it wouldn’t make sense, experts say.
“This is a distribution system issue, which is different than a big pipeline issue,” Christi Tezak, a ClearView Energy Partners analyst who studies pipelines and electricity markets, told the Washington Examiner.
Authorities say the deadly explosions were caused by too much natural gas being pumped into a pipe owned by Columbia Gas, a local utility company that owns and operates nearly 5,000 miles of gas pipeline across Massachusetts.
The overpressure forced the gas to leak into homes, and destroyed dozens of them in the Boston-area communities of Lawrence, Andover, and North Andover. Twenty-five people were injured in the explosions, and 18-year-old Leonel Rondon was killed.
National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Robert Sumwalt said at a news briefing Sunday that the agency will investigate why the overpressuring occurred.
Columbia Gas had been in the process of replacing old cast iron pipes with new plastic ones, and it’s unclear if that contributed to the explosions. The utility said Monday it will speed up its replacement of old pipeline that was already part of an ongoing modernization effort.
Projects like these are urgently needed across the country, experts say, especially in Massachusetts. Some pipelines in the state are a century old, Phillips said, built way before the advent of natural gas that became America’s dominant fuel source from the shale boom.
Nationally, roughly half of the 2.4 million miles of pipelines in the U.S. were installed before 1970, Deborah Hersman, chief executive of the nonprofit National Safety Council and a former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, told Reuters on Monday.
The Environmental Protection Agency has encouraged the replacement of old pipes to prevent gas leaks from emitting greenhouse gases that warm the planet, Tezak said. But some progressive cities and states have been hesitant to support extending the life of fossil fuel infrastructure, she said.
“The story I see here is about the basic question of the health of natural gas infrastructure, particularly in older cities,” Tezak said. “While no one welcomes a rate hike, when you have these older systems, there needs to be a day of reckoning. Some people would love to see the complete removal of fossil fuels from our energy system, but does that mean you leave in old pipes while we make that transition?”
Massachusetts lawmakers acted in 2016, passing a law that required utility companies to fix the worst gas leaks.
About 15 percent of Columbia Gas’ pipes are leak-prone, the company told the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities in April as part of its modernization plan, under which it requested a rate hike to pay for upgrades. The company has not had a safety incident before last week’s explosions.
Yet this week’s accident was not isolated.
Since 1998, at least 646 serious gas distribution accidents have occurred across the country, causing 221 deaths and injuring nearly a thousand people, according to the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.
The most recent large-scale deadly gas accident occurred in 2010 in San Bruno, Calif., when an electrical failure caused gas to flow at high pressure into an old pipeline, prompting an explosion that killed eight people and destroyed 38 homes.
Najmedin Meshkati, an engineering professor at the University of Southern California who has studied gas pipeline accidents for 30 years, said he sees similarities between last week’s explosion, and the one in San Bruno.
“It has the hallmarks of an organization accident,” Meshkati told the Washington Examiner.
Meshkati cautioned that the investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board would draw firm conclusions. But based on information available today, he said Columbia Gas has to assume responsibility.
The utility has said it was using contractors to do the construction work on its lines before the accident.
“They should not hold the contractors responsible,” said Meshkati, who is also a fellow at Harvard University. “They are basically at the tip of the iceberg. The iceberg is the organization safety culture. We need a sense of chronic unease when it comes to the safety of this complex gas delivery system. This should be a rude awakening for energy companies to take a hard look at their safety practices.”
But Meshkati takes issue with claims that gas is dangerous, and notes that renewables’ share of the electricity mix is growing, but unable to fully power the energy system.
“There is nothing inherently dangerous about delivering gas,” he said. “That is an emotional argument and baseless. There is no question we need more renewables. But we need more wind and solar because of climate change, an entirely different question.”
