Monday, February 8, 2010

Natural Gas Plant Explosion, a reminder that NG can be deadly

Yesterday's deadly blast at the Middletown, CT Kleen Energy Plant is a reminder that natural gas can be deadly.

The structure is so unstable that they called off the search this morning. They are still trying to get a list of workers who may have been working in the plant at the time of the explosion. Most of the 100 people believed to be there have been accounted for. The plant was designed to run by burning natural gas and construction was almost completed.

Those of us who live in our nation's "shale country", know this "clean burning" involves very dirty extraction and processing. We can add "explosive" to the list. It sure wasn't hard to find other natural gas processing, energy plant explosions, tanker truck dangers, storage tanks and pipeline dangers. Here are just a few.

Carthage, Texas DCP Midstream gas processing plant.

Natural Gas tanker truck dangers.

Bushland, Texas near Bushland High School

St Elmo's Fire in Illinois above ground gas storage tank

Natural Gas Plant Alaska

Justice, IL natural gas plant

And for those of us in Flower Mound. Hear is one from our "good neighbor" Williams.
Williams Production Co. field natural gas processing plant

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I guess any natural gas processing, including compressor stations, have the potential to explode. Also, I read on this blog that the tank batteries storing produced water can explode too.
Scary

Anonymous said...

That is NOT a Natural Gas Plant which is under construction. It is an ELECTRICITY GENERATION plant which will access the natural gas pipeline from Canada which runs through the property and has for many years. It is intended to use natural gas rather than coal to produce electrity for southern New England.
If you have a monthly bill from ATMOS, you have many natural gas lines throughout your neighborhood.

Anonymous said...

Does it matter what kind of plant it was? The point of this post is that natural gas and it's waste water/produced water is flammable.