LA PORTE, Texas (KTRK) — A startling sight of a persistent fire shooting into the air began to unfold Monday in the heart of the Houston area’s oil and gas corridor.
Dallas-based company Energy Transfer said an incident at its 20-inch pipeline occurred just off Spencer Highway in Deer Park.
The City of Deer Park said the pipeline is burning the chemical “Y Grade NGL,” natural gas liquid, which a U.S. Energy Information Administration presentation generally identifies as a mixture of ethane, propane, butanes, and natural “gasoline,” or pentanes.
Those words should be familiar in everyday life as flammables.
Oil Price Information Service, a Dow Jones-owned data digest for the fuel supply industry, simplifies NGLs as “removed from natural gas at natural gas processing plants as a combined stream, often called raw make or y-grade.”
“This combined stream, like the strands in a rope, is then fractionated (separated) to produce the products ethane, liquefied petroleum gases (propane and butanes), and natural gasoline. Though they are derived from a vaporous stream, natural gas liquids are kept in a liquid state for storage, shipping, and consumption,” OPIS wrote in a November 2022 explanation blog.
What about the safety of NGLs? The evacuations and shelter-in-place orders should signal the severity of what’s occurring.
Food & Water Watch, a nonprofit watchdog group, said NGLs are colorless and nearly odorless, and using a cell phone could spark a fire. The Associated Press additionally reported on a chemical smell in the air in the early stage.
Harris County’s air monitoring dashboard, implemented in the wake of the 2019 ITC fire, has already identified the pipeline fire in multiple areas in Deer Park and La Porte.
SEE MORE: Deer Park pipeline fire will take hours to burn out, possibly stretching into Tuesday, officials say
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