Perry switches his focus to pipeline cybersecurity
Natural gas backers say he’s just looking to justify coal revival
WASHINGTON — More than 300,000 miles of natural gas transmission lines crisscross the U.S., fueling electricity and industrial plants and heating homes, while also providing an alluring target for hackers looking to disrupt the American economy.
Now those pipelines are at the center of a debate in Washington about the future of the power grid, as Energy Secretary Rick Perry argues that an increasingly sophisticated cybersecurity threat makes relying on natural gas to the exclusion of coal and nuclear plants a disaster waiting to happen.
“You have a greater reliance on natural gas than you’ve ever had before,” Bruce Walker, assistant secretary of electricity and energy reliability, said in an interview. “Because of the interdependence on the gas infrastructure, if you take out a pipeline, you can also take out 10 to 15 (power) generators.”
The administration’s concern about cybersecurity comes as the White House considers next steps in its bid to halt the closure
of coal and nuclear power plants, which have come under increasing economic pressure from the huge glut of cheap gas coming out of shale fields in Texas and other states, as well as increasingly efficient renewable energy sources such as wind and solar.
That has set the administration and Perry in direct conflict with natural gas producers, many of whom believe the administration is raising the issue of cybersecurity of gas pipelines to justify bailing out a coal sector that President Donald Trump has promised to revive.
“They are certainly using every argument they can come up with to try and justify it,” said one pipeline executive, who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of talks with the White House. “The challenge is, we don’t want to advertise all the measures we're taking to deal with the threat. You’re trapped.”
The president is considering unprecedented use of his national security powers to order power grid operators to buy electricity from a list of struggling coal and nuclear plants for two years “to forestall any further action toward retirement, decommissioning or deactivation of such facilities,” according to Department of Energy memo.
Lobbyists for oil and gas companies are fighting to head off such action, arguing in meetings on Capitol Hill that pipelines are as well protected from cyber threats as any U.S. industry and the administration’s talking points amount to another attempt to bail out the coal sector.
“To single out gas infrastructure, it misses the point. All the energy sector is being targeted by bad actors,” said Todd Snitchler, director of market development at the American Petroleum Institute. “The oil and gas industry takes our cybersecurity very seriously. It’s being managed all the way up to the board level.”
Cyberattacks are a constant threat for energy companies, with power utilities and oil and gas companies routinely targeted by hackers working for everyone from foreign governments to organized crime.
In April, hackers briefly shut down a data network used by a variety of pipeline companies, including Energy Transfer Partners of Dallas and Tulsa company Oneok.
No gas deliveries were interrupted, the companies said, but the attacks shone a light on the industry’s vulnerabilities.
Chris Bronk, a professor of information technology at the University of Houston, said pipeline operators are improving, but they have not reached the cybersecurity sophistication of large oil companies such as Exxon Mobil or large banks, which early on recognized the threat hackers posed to their business.
But, he added, any system is vulnerable and making economic decisions based on cyber threats is a losing battle.
“Anything can be hacked,” he said. “I’ve never seen thinking like this in any other case. Nobody ever came to me and said we need to keep VHS going because digital TV might get hacked.”
The Department of Energy says it is increasing its efforts to help the the energy sector in protect itself from cyberattacks, recently creating the Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security and Emergency Response.
While Energy Department officials concede all energy networks are vulnerable to hackers, they said pipelines provide a potential weak spot to hackers looking to disrupt the power grid.
“When you’re looking at the portfolio of generation, it would better for us to have fuel on site regardless of what type it is,” Walker, the assistant secretary said. “It eliminates one aspect of the vulnerability.”
james.osborne@chron.com twitter.com/osborneja