2018 Antonelli Award Winner: On a Monday morning, just as the country is waking up to a new workweek, a team of terrorists attacks, boards, and explodes an outbound Liquefied Petroleum Gas tanker, sinking it in the Houston Ship Channel and thereby blocking the channel. The Kinder Morgan Pasadena refined products terminal fuel transfer facility located along the channel is shut down, and the connection to the Colonial Pipeline, which supplies the East Coast, is physically destroyed (see Figures 1 and 2). That evening, while many in the country are still processing the morning’s events, cyberterrorist actors attack Houston’s electrical grid, leading to blackouts along the shipping channel and leaving much of the country’s oil, gas, and chemical infrastructure cold and dark. Through these attacks, roughly 30-60 percent of America’s daily refined oil products are cut off, the nation’s largest petrochemical complex is isolated, and America’s most critical energy node is physically and electronically isolated—and will be for weeks. Even as federal and state officials rush to mitigate the attack's impact and to neutralize the threat, they recognize that the country will take years to register the full economic and social impact of the day’s events.
Although the above scenario is hypothetical, the vulnerabilities it highlights are real. Before Hurricane Harvey made landfall in 2017, most Americans barely noticed the potential threat to energy supplies and distribution found in the Houston area. Citizens watched the devastation from their well-lit homes and drove to work giving little thought to the sources of the gas fueling their cars. People in other parts of the country went about their lives not realizing how close they were to fuel and electricity shortages because of a storm on the Gulf Coast. The vulnerabilities present in south Texas, which is home to much of the nation’s oil and gas refinery capacity and chemical production, represents one risk to America’s economic and homeland security through the disruption of energy generation, distribution, and transmission.
The energy sector in the United States (U.S.) enables our prosperity because it is the foundation to the proper functioning of our critical infrastructure sectors, such as financial services, health care systems, transportation networks, telecommunication systems, and agriculture. The generation, distribution, and transmission of energy must be robust and resilient enough to support industry, residences, governments, commerce, health infrastructure, and more across the country. Factories, jobs in those factories, and service providers need reliable energy networks for full productivity. Additionally, exports such as natural gas require a sound and resilient network to provide endless kilowatt-hours to consumers outside the country. Reliable and secure energy is needed to keep the American economic engine humming. Sustained energy generation is also required for the U.S. to crowd out would-be competitors in energy markets. American prosperity currently benefits from oil and natural gas exports and may benefit from solar panel, windmill, and/or battery storage technology exports in the future. The key is to secure a reliable energy network and industrial base sufficient to fuel future economic growth.
The nation’s homeland security and economic prowess should not rest on fragile energy networks, industries, and enterprises. The country’s energy supply is composed of systems within systems nested within systems, and when one interdependent system fails-they can all be impacted. Threats to the nation’s energy supplies and networks are very real, yet few citizens recognize the need to bolster our energy security. America’s leaders cannot allow nightmare scenarios to become a reality. National security and economic prosperity depend on energy resiliency. There is no room for failure.
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