Crude natural gas is usually saturated with water downhole at warm temperatures and high pressures, some of which condenses as it is produced at the surface.

At many points in a pipeline further water removal can be essential too.

Even when not liquefied like LPG, when passing through a restriction valve or orifice, there is still additional cooling due to the product acting a bit like a refigerant.

The water content may be small but the quantity of cold gas passing through a narrow point which is well below 0C eventually can build up kilos of ice and block the flow until the ambient temperature rises enough to open it back up.

And you get can get clathrates (combinations of methane/ethane/propane and water).

Methane can't realistically freeze in the pipes, but unrefined natural gas has plenty of impurities which can. Note they're talking about "pipelines and wells" freezing in a gas production context, not residential gas mains.

Understandable. As long as it remains available, the price hike seems to incentivize operators to expend energy on manually thawing them. I'm assuming they could rig up makeshift natural gas burners/heat lamps to keep critical sections above freezing.

I feel like this reads like the first 60 seconds of intro to one of those youtube disaster-recounting videos.

https://www.youtube.com/user/USCSB being one of said channels. I don't want to say in enjoy their videos due to the content, but for being so simple they convey a great deal of information in a way that few other media have done in decades.

The one I was thinking of is https://youtube.com/c/FascinatingHorror - they aren't quite as in depth but cover a lot of different events.

Thanks for the link.

And yes, my wording seemed weird, even to me.

I've definitely watched over 20 hours of their content. It's very well produced, very approachable and easy to understand. I'm pleasantly surprised at how good of a resource their videos are. I had lower expectations with them being part of the federal government.