U.S. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz recently called for increased investments in U.S. energy emergency response. Secretary Moniz highlighted DOE’s expanded emergency response responsibilities and the need for comprehensive and coordinated response capabilities in the face of increasingly integrated energy systems and an evolving threat environment.
“The Department of Energy uses its expertise in transformative science and technology solutions to support and enhance our nation’s emergency response capabilities. Through our private and public partnerships, we apply these solutions to prepare for emergencies, mitigate risks, and expedite restoration and recovery from incidents impacting the energy sector,” Moniz said. “Looking ahead, Congress will be a key partner in ensuring that we strengthen our prevention and response capabilities.”
According to Moniz, the nation’s energy systems and their vulnerabilities are undergoing significant changes. To appreciate DOE’s essential and expanded role in energy emergency response today and in the future, Moniz explained it is important to place this discussion in the context of these remarkable changes and to examine the authorities and resources the department has to address current and rapidly evolving threats to these systems.
“While most of our energy infrastructures are privately owned and operated, energy is foundational to the nation’s economic prosperity and national security,” he said. “As the president has pointed out, energy and communications systems enable all other infrastructures to function. If we don’t protect the energy sector, we’re putting every other sector of the economy in peril.”
Changed energy profile
Moniz highlighted the dramatically changed energy profile of the U.S. over the past decade and then discussed the evolving threat environment. The U.S. is now the No. 1 producer of oil and gas in the world, and it is producing more oil than it imports for the first time in decades. According to Moniz, natural gas recently replaced coal as the largest fuel source for power generation.
“Importantly, unconventional oil and gas are also being produced in unconventional locations with potential implications for the transportation infrastructure to move these supplies to market, including recent congestion on railroads, inland waterways and ports, which will continue to need to be evaluated,” Moniz said during his testimony before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. “U.S. companies are also exporting oil and natural gas, with security implications for global supply chains.”
The April 2015 Quadrennial Energy Review (QER) has concluded this in key areas. Moniz stated the country’s energy and related infrastructures have not kept pace with changes in the volume and geography of oil and gas production.
Moniz also emphasized the U.S.’s allies and other key partners have significant energy supply and infrastructure vulnerabilities, as was exposed by the 2014 Russian aggression in Ukraine. In response to this aggression, the U.S. and its G-7 partners developed a set of broad and collective energy security principles, two of which are especially important:
• Putting in place emergency response systems, including reserves and fuel substitution for importing countries, in case of major energy disruptions.
• Improving energy systems’ resilience by promoting infrastructure modernization and supply-and-demand policies that help withstand systemic shocks.
“A discussion of the evolving threat environment should start with the establishment of DOE in 1977 and how its role in emergency response was described in the Department of Energy Organization Act,” Moniz said. “At that time, the nation’s energy vulnerability was perceived to be largely associated with growing oil imports, a global oil cartel, the real threat of physical disruption of oil supplies and the inadequacy of an effective emergency response mechanism.”
Changing threat environment
Today, the U.S. faces a very different set of threats to its energy systems that guide both the structure and nature of energy emergency responses.
“Energy infrastructure is extending across state and international boundaries,” Moniz stated. “We are also now operating in a post-9/11 threat environment that provides a new context and framework for what we as a department are responsible for and do in emergency response. We know that adversaries and homegrown actors are interested in the vulnerabilities of our critical infrastructures.”
In response to this, there are now a range of laws, actions, and presidential directives and orders designed to protect U.S. citizens, its economy and critical infrastructures from those with malevolent intent. These threats include natural and manmade events such as severe weather, natural disasters, electromagnetic pulses (EMPs), aging infrastructure, cyber threats and growing infrastructure interdependencies.
In addition, the U.S. is seeing a rise in extreme weather events that are projected to increase in frequency and intensity. According to Moniz, these events have regional and at times national-scale impacts on the nation’s energy infrastructures and highlight the need for comprehensive and coordinated emergency response.
“According to the QER, billion-dollar weather events, especially severe storms, have risen dramatically in the last 15 years and are indicators of the vulnerabilities of our energy systems to climate change and costly disruptions,” Moniz said. “They have stressed our response capabilities and resources and underscored the interdependence of our critical infrastructures.
“Further, our energy infrastructures are increasingly interdependent, and all are dependent on electricity. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, for example, downed 85,000 utility poles, 800 distribution substations and thousands of miles of transmission lines. On the worst day of these sequential events, the nation also lost almost 30 percent of its refining capacity. Three weeks after Rita hit, oil markets were still short around 2 million barrels a day.”
Moniz emphasized the Gulf Coast region is now home to nearly 50 percent of the nation’s refining capacity, so damage to liquid fuels infrastructure in this region can lead to significant impacts on much of the rest of the country, as the Gulf supplies oil products to the Northeast, Midwest, Mid-Atlantic and South Atlantic regions.
Partnering with industry, exercising the plan
The DOE has worked closely with the National Petroleum Council (NPC) to identify opportunities to strengthen emergency preparedness. At Moniz’s request, the NPC conducted a comprehensive study on this topic and presented an Emergency Preparedness Report, which included a number of recommendations for strengthening how the department and the oil and natural gas industry work together to respond to emergencies.
“Over the past year, DOE has made progress implementing the recommendations contained in the report,” Moniz said. “For instance, DOE is now using the National Incident Management System and Incident Command System to ensure that we can easily integrate with other emergency management organizations around the country. DOE’s Infrastructure Security and Energy Restoration team now has Energy Information Administration experts embedded in its emergency response organization, so they have the benefit of their insights into the oil and natural gas industry during emergencies. In addition, the department is working more frequently with the oil and natural gas industry on disaster preparedness exercises. In fact, the NPC was one of the department’s key partners in the development of the Clear Path IV exercise.”
According to Moniz, the Clear Path exercise scenario focused on identifying how DOE and its public-private energy stakeholders would coordinate in response to a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and subsequent tsunami stemming from the 700-mile-long Cascadia Subduction Zone that stretches along the Washington and Oregon coasts. As a result of the exercise, DOE is working with the Department of Homeland Security and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to provide damage assessments through advanced algorithms that analyze aerial imagery, highlighting the role of science and technology solutions.
“Robust exercises are crucial to ensure industry and government are better prepared to work as a team during real-world emergencies such as hurricanes, earthquakes or cyberattacks,” Moniz said. “DOE leads preparedness exercises at the local, state and national levels. For example, DOE led the federal participation in the North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s Grid Ex III, the largest electricity sector crisis response exercise ever. More than 350 government and industry organizations, as well as 4,500 participants, played a role in testing and shaping the national response plan.”
For more information, visit http://energy.gov or call (202) 586-5000.
