1. Ok, so here’s something I actually know quite a bit about.

Natural gas lines freezing.

Seeing a lot of shade thrown around about “why didn’t they winterize”

2. For you physics types what happens to a pressurized gas that travels across a pressure drop?

It gets fucking cold.

Pressure drops are everywhere in flowline and pipeline systems.

3. It starts at the well head itself. Let’s say you have a motherfucker of a well with a flowing tubing pressure of 6500 PSI.

How do we control this? With a choke. We literally insert a little bitty orifice into the choke body to limit the flow of the well.

4. Why do we choke the well back? Standard piping and 600 series flanges are rated at 1440psi and a MAWP of 1368 psi.

Also we don’t want to pull the well so hard we collapse the formation.

5. So on to “winterization.”

You can wrap heat trace, hang tarps, pump hundreds of gallons of methanol to try and prevent hydrates.

But I’m here to tell you. If it gets cold enough? That shit will absolutely freeze up tighter than a crabs ass.

6. So unless you want fucking Texas O/G operators to spend hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars to protect from a maybe once in a lifetime event.

Please just shut the fuck up because 99% of you have no fucking clue.

Thanks