Enbridge<\/a> (No. 397 on the Fortune Global 500) is North America\u2019s largest pipeline and energy storage company, and it is currently in the process of building more new gas storage than anyone\u2014all from expanding its existing salt caverns in Texas and Louisiana. Caitlin Tessin, vice president for Enbridge\u2019s gas transmission, told Fortune she isn\u2019t losing sleep over storage just yet, but it is a growing issue.<\/p>\n\u201cOur pipes are full. There is an incredible demand from a natural gas perspective, and our existing infrastructure and assets are full,\u201d Tessin said. \u201cThere\u2019s some concern around supply of storage.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThis [growth] is absolutely unprecedented from a gas storage and demand perspective,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n
Tessin said natural gas pipelines and storage will prove to be the \u201cbackbone\u201d of digital infrastructure AI, even pairing gas with renewable energy to power AI. \u201cForemost for that crowd is reliability for powering those data centers, offering that 24\/7 baseload power, and rapid deployment.\u201d<\/p>\n
Energy analyst Jack Weixel, of East Daley Analytics,\u00a0said there around more than a dozen gas storage projects underway\u2014with a couple recently completed\u2014but some will fall short of the necessary financing to break ground, and others may not be completed for another five years.<\/p>\n
About twice as much storage capacity is needed than the roughly 300 billion cubic feet of storage currently planned, Weixel said. The need for data centers, electrification, and gas exports is huge, but the key is still to maintain a strong grid overall, he said, and that requires more gas storage for steady reliability.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe No. 1 rule there for utilities is don\u2019t freeze grandma,\u201d Weixel said.<\/p>\n
Salt of the earth<\/p>\n
Unlike with the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve for crude oil, there\u2019s no federal backstop for natural gas storage.<\/p>\n
That means the industry must build commercial storage itself with the promise of revenues years away\u2014a key reason why there\u2019s a wait-and-see approach to commencing projects only once there are strong enough demand and pricing signals.<\/p>\n
There are two main options for developing storage. The first involves drilling into naturally occurring salt domes in the earth and injecting water to pump and hollow out the space. This \u201cleaching\u201d of the caverns is time consuming, often requiring four years of construction.<\/p>\n
The cheaper and faster option is using existing gas wells that are dried up, essentially pumping gas back into the depleted reservoirs. But such reservoirs are not as structurally sound as salt caverns and cannot handle higher pressures, so companies cannot inject and withdraw gas as frequently from them. Typically, injection occurs during the summer and fall, and the gas is pumped back out for winter when heating demand spikes.<\/p>\n
Weather disruptions can range from fog to pipes freezing, but the biggest fear is a massive hurricane aimed right at the gas-exporting infrastructure concentrated along the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast, Weixel said. That could lead to a lot of stranded gas\u2014nationwide, storage is already near capacity.<\/p>\n
\u201cTypically, those hurricanes hit late in injection season, so there may not be room for the gas. It\u2019s operational chaos,\u201d Weixel said.<\/p>\n
With adequate storage, companies can \u201csave the gas and squirrel it away like an acorn. And then pull it out in the winter once operations are normal.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Enbridge](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Tres_Palacios_Gas_Storage_22.jpg\"\/)
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What\u2019s being done?<\/p>\n
Knolle\u2019s FRESH project (Freeport Energy Storage Hub) southwest of Houston aims to commence construction in the back half of 2026 to 26 billion cubic feet of gas capacity between two salt caverns.<\/p>\n
Enbridge is expanding its Moss Bluff and Egan storage facilities in Texas and Louisiana, respectively to add a combined 23 billion cubic feet, Tessin said, coming online incrementally from 2028 to 2033. Enbridge also recently completed an expansion of its large Tres Palacios hub in South Texas and just announced more growth expected there\u2014three new caverns adding 24 billion cubic feet from 2028 to 2030.<\/p>\n
But the only major storage project recently completed is Trinity Gas Storage\u2019s brand-new East Texas facility with 24 billion cubic feet of storage. In December, Trinity just approved an expansion to add another 13 billion feet by late summer 2026. Trinity\u2019s approach is one of the only projects using depleted reservoirs instead of salt domes.<\/p>\n
Trinity CEO Jim Goetz told Fortune that more storage built quickly is critical to keep up with the pace of the data center boom, especially because so many of them require building their own temporary gas-fired power before they can be connected to the power grid. The storage provides necessary redundancies for any gas or power disruptions, he said.<\/p>\n
The industry built up enough storage for the early days of the shale gas boom through 2010 or so, but it completely stagnated from then until now. He called this a wave of construction growth for \u201cgas storage super-cycle 2.0.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe market is kind of like a pendulum, and we seem to go from one extreme to the other,\u201d Goetz said. \u201cNow we\u2019re caught behind the eight-ball here, and we have to catch up.\u201d<\/p>\n
He worries the industry isn\u2019t moving forward with enough storage projects quickly enough. And, yet, he\u2019s oddly confident that capitalism will find a way\u2014just as it has in the past.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a problem that will get solved,\u201d Goetz said. \u201cHow? I\u2019m not necessarily sure. But it must get solved; I think it\u2019s just there\u2019s too much riding on it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A slow-starting race to build underground salt caverns could hamper the AI data center boom and weaken power…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":199807,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,85,46,28757,125],"class_list":{"0":"post-199806","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-il","12":"tag-israel","13":"tag-natural-gas","14":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199806","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199806"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199806\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/199807"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Enbridge's](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Egan_Gas_Storage_10.jpg\"\/)
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