BL Companies Director of Energy Engineering Ian McPhillips was quoted in a recent The Epoch Times article about how the proliferation of data centers is posing a new challenge to the aging natural gas pipeline infrastructure in the United States. In the article “Inside the Race to Fix America’s Gas Pipelines Amid AI Center Boom,” experts weighed in on the situation we currently face — many natural gas pipelines are operating near capacity while demand for electricity is growing faster than it has in years.
Ian has more than 15 years of experience in natural gas and utility engineering. He started out performing distribution integrity engineering for natural gas pipelines and distribution infrastructure. Recently he has been managing a wide array of utility projects, including many multi-disciplined designs, making use of his engineering knowledge with onshore LNG and natural gas delivery assets. Here is the excerpt where Ian was quoted:
Ian McPhillips, director of energy engineering and principal at BL Companies, explained it’s not just the total annual consumption that’s increasing. The fact that the majority of that increase is driven by power generation makes it tricky.
“Generation facilities are being built around the entire country to keep up with electric demand, and if those plants are using gas that would otherwise be heading to the population centers in the Northeast, significant changes will be needed to provide gas to generators during periods of cold weather when firm gas supplies are committed to the space heating markets,” he told The Epoch Times.
Read the full article here.