Coral reef predators get 70% of their energy from the open ocean

Many reef fish rely on coral for shelter but get their nutrients from plankton. 

Photo by Christina Skinner

Feb. 19 (UPI) -- Food webs anchored by coral reefs extend much farther into open waters than scientists previously thought.

According to a new study, published Friday in the journal Science Advances, more than 70% of the caloric energy consumed by reef predators is sourced from the open ocean.

Open surface waters in the tropics are low in nutrients and typically thought to be relatively unproductive, but the latest research these environments are more ecologically valuable than scientists previously estimated.

For the study, scientists used isotopic analysis to examine the diets of four grouper species captured near coral reefs in the Maldives, an island chain a few hundred miles southwest of India.

RELATED Open ocean 'surface slicks' serve as nurseries for dozens of fish species

The analysis showed all four predatory fish rely on open ocean resources. Scientists found evidence of offshore resource consumption among groupers captured both outside of an atoll, a ring-shaped reef, as well as grouper found in the lagoon within.

Scientists suspect grouper are feeding on plankton-eating fish that rely on coral reef for shelter instead of food.

Researchers estimate upwelling from the deep ocean is responsible for the delivering of nutrient-dense water to the surface, fueling the plankton that feed many reef fish -- fish that often end up in the stomachs of grouper."The study provides key insights into the nutrition of coral reef ecosystems, especially their dependence on offshore production," ecologist and study lead author Christina Skinner said in a news release.

"Detailed knowledge of food web dynamics is crucial to understand the impacts of anthropogenic and climate-induced change in marine ecosystems."

Skinner led the research while working at Newcastle University, but now works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

RELATED World's coral reefs could be lost by century's end, U.N. report says

"The results force us to reconsider how we view coral reefs, and they highlight the extent of the connectivity with the surrounding ocean," she said.

"If these groupers are mostly reliant on offshore energy to support their feeding, then maybe they won't be so impacted by the loss of live coral, as many fishery studies have predicted; they may be more resilient."

But coral reefs aren't the only ecosystems affected by climate change. Studies suggest global warming is already altering the makeup of plankton communities and other groups of microorganisms in the open ocean, and some models predict open ocean productivity will decline as the planet heats up.

"If that is the case, and these groupers are reliant on that open ocean energy, they will be impacted by those changes," Skinner said.

Researchers suggest their study's biggest takeaway is that open water and coral reef ecosystems are inextricably linked.

The effects of warming trends and coastal pollution on coral reef health has been well documented, and the latest findings suggests are a reminder that what's bad for reefs may also be bad for neighboring ecosystems.

"Coral reefs are really suffering across the tropics from climate-related disturbances, particularly oceanic warming," said co-author Nick Polunin, professor of environmental sciences at Newcastle.

"In spite of its tiny area, this ecosystem is a massive contributor to marine biodiversity and this study highlights how little we know about the food web sources sustaining that exceptional wealth of species it sustains."

PRATT&WHITNEY 4000 ENGINES
Boeing 777 planes grounded by airlines in US and Japan after engine failure


Issued on: 22/02/2021 - 04:41

FILE PHOTO: A United Airlines Boeing 777-200ER plane is towed as an American Airlines Boeing 737 plane departs from O'Hare International Airport in Chicago, Illinois, U.S. Nov. 30, 2018. © Kamil Krzaczynski, Reuters

Boeing Co said it recommended suspending the use of 777 jets with the same type of engine that shed debris over Denver at the weekend after U.S. regulators announced extra inspections and Japan suspended their use while considering further action.

The moves involving Pratt & Whitney 4000 engines came after a United Airlines 777 landed safely at Denver International Airport on Saturday local time after its right engine failed.

United said the next day it would voluntarily and temporarily remove its 24 active planes, hours before Boeing's announcement.

Boeing said 69 of the planes were in service and 59 were in storage, at a time when airlines have grounded planes due to a plunge in demand associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.

The manufacturer recommended airlines suspend operations until U.S. regulators identified the appropriate inspection protocol.

The 777-200s and 777-300s affected are older and less fuel efficient than newer models and most operators are phasing them out of their fleets.

Images posted by police in Broomfield, Colorado showed significant plane debris on the ground, including an engine cowling scattered outside a home and what appeared to be other parts in a field.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said its initial examination of the plane indicated most of the damage was confined to the right engine, with only minor damage to the airplane.

It said the inlet and casing separated from the engine and two fan blades were fractured, while the remainder of the fan blades exhibited damage.

Japan's transport ministry ordered Japan Airlines Co Ltd (JAL) and ANA Holdings Inc to suspend the use of 777s with P&W4000 engines while it considered whether to take additional measures.

The ministry said that on Dec. 4, 2020, a JAL flight from Naha Airport to Tokyo International Airport returned to the airport due to a malfunction in the left engine about 100 kilometres north of Naha Airport.

That plane was the same age as the 26-year-old United Airlines plane involved in the latest incident.

United is the only U.S. operator of the planes, according to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The other airlines using them are in Japan and South Korea, the U.S. agency said.

"We reviewed all available safety data," the FAA said in a statement. "Based on the initial information, we concluded that the inspection interval should be stepped up for the hollow fan blades that are unique to this model of engine, used solely on Boeing 777 airplanes."

Japan said ANA operated 19 of the type and JAL operated 13 of them, though the airlines said their use had been reduced during the pandemic. JAL said its fleet was due for retirement by March 2022.

Pratt & Whitney, owned by Raytheon Technologies Corp , was not available immediately for comment.

A spokeswoman for South Korea's transport ministry, speaking before Boeing recommended suspending operations, said it was monitoring the situation but had not yet taken any action.

Korean Air Lines Co Ltd said it had 12 of the planes, half of them stored, and it would consult with the manufacturer and regulators and stop flying them to Japan for now.

In Feb. 2018, a 777 of the same age operated by United and bound for Honolulu suffered an engine failure when a cowling fell off about 30 minutes before the plane landed safely. The NTSB determined that incident was the result of a full-length fan blade fracture.

Because of that 2018 incident, Pratt & Whitney reviewed inspection records for all previously inspected PW4000 fan blades, the NTSB said. The FAA in March 2019 issued a directive requiring initial and recurring inspections of the fan blades on the PW4000 engines.

United pulls 24 Boeing 777s; FAA orders inspections after engine failure


The Broomfield Police Department said Sunday that they have been "inundated" with calls concerning debris found throughout the city after a Boeing 777 plane had to make an emergency landing in Denver after suffering engine failure on Saturday. Photo courtesy of the Broomfield Police Department/Facebook


Feb. 21 (UPI) -- United Airlines said Sunday it was temporarily removing 24 of its Boeing 777 aircraft from service a day after one of its flights had to make an emergency landing due to engine failure.

The announcement from United came about an hour after the Federal Aviation Administration said it was increasing inspections of Boeing 777 aircraft, which would "likely mean that some airplanes will be removed from service."

United said via Twitter the planes "voluntarily & temporarily" pulled from service were powered by the same Pratt & Whitney 4000-112 series engine used in the Denver-to-Honolulu Flight 328 on Saturday when engine failure shortly after takeoff caused it to litter debris over the town of Broomfield, Colo., about 32 miles from the Denver airport.

The two-engine plane was forced to return to the Denver airport where no injuries were reported among the 229 passengers and 10 crew members on board.

The Broomfield Police Department said Sunday that it has been "inundated with debris calls" and instructed the public "to only contact us now if they find a large piece of the plane."

United said they are working closely with regulators to determine steps that need to be taken, which should only inconvenience "a small number of customers."

Steve Dickson, the FAA administrator, said the stepped-up inspections should focus on the hollow fan blades unique to the Pratt & Whitney 4000 series engine that is solely used on Boeing 777 aircraft.

Iraq's ancient Christian community, decimated by violence, fear

Issued on: 22/02/2021 - 

Two decades of violence have decimated Iraq's historic Christian community

 AHMAD AL-RUBAYE AFP/File


Baghdad (AFP)

Some fled after the US-led invasion, others during sectarian bloodshed and more following jihadist attacks. Iraq's last two violent decades have hollowed out its Christian community which dates back two millennia.

After first settling in the fertile plains of Nineveh province before heading for the busy boulevards of Baghdad, more than one million Christians have in more modern times been uprooted by Iraq's consecutive conflicts.

"By the age of 24, I had already lived through and survived three wars," said Sally Fawzi, an Iraqi Chaldean Catholic, who left her country more than a decade ago and is now living in the US state of Texas.

Some members of Iraq's historic Christian community escaped to the nearby autonomous Kurdish region, others waited in neighbouring Jordan to emigrate and then resettled in countries as far away as Australia.

Many lost hope in their homeland long ago, but see next month's scheduled visit by Pope Francis -- the first-ever papal trip to Iraq -- as an important opportunity for him to use his voice to garner international support for Iraqis of their faith.

Iraq's Christian community is one of the oldest and most diverse in the world, featuring Chaldean, Armenian Orthodox, Protestant as well as other branches of Christianity.

By 2003, when then-dictator Saddam Hussein was toppled, there were 1.5 million Christians in a country of 25 million people, or around six percent of the population.

But as Iraq's population mushroomed, the percentage of the minorities shrank.

Today, only 400,000 Christians remain in a predominantly Muslim country of 40 million people, said William Warda, co-founder of the Hammurabi Human Rights Organisation.

Among those who left, nearly half a million resettled in the United States. Others ended up dispersed in Canada, Australia, Norway and other parts of Europe.

- The first wave -

Rana Said, 40, had tried her hardest to stay.

Her aunt and uncle were killed in 2007, when US soldiers blindly opened fire on the streets of Mosul after an attack in the regional capital of the northern province of Nineveh.

Still, she remained in the city with her husband Ammar al-Kass, 41, a veterinarian.

The following year, with Iraq gripped by sectarian bloodletting, a string of assassinations, including of Christians, pushed the Kass family to move to the relative safety of Iraqi Kurdistan.

But by 2013, the region was growing increasingly unstable.

The couple finally left their ancestral Iraq and were resettled on the Gold Coast of Australia where they found jobs in their respective professions and have raised three daughters: Sara, 10, Liza, six, and three-year-old Rose.

The young girls have never visited Iraq, although they speak Arabic and a modern dialect of Assyrian -- the ancient language of Christ -- at home.

A year after they resettled, jihadists from the so-called Islamic State group swept through their city. The family watched in horror from halfway around the world.

"The fall of Mosul wasn't easy for us," Ammar recounted, particularly IS's destruction of the city's Church of the Virgin Mary, a 1,200-year-old piece of treasured heritage.

"That's where my father was married. It was razed and obliterated to the ground," he said.

He tried to keep his wife -- pregnant with Liza at the time -- away from computers and phones, afraid the added stress would harm the baby.

"I used to have nightmares about IS entering and killing and raping my family. It was a repetitive, horrible dream," Rana said emotionally, of the jihadists who forced women of the Yazidi religious minority and those of other minorities into sexual slavery.

- Lingering in limbo -

Saad Hormuz lived the IS nightmare in person.

On August 6, 2014, IS fighters swept into Bartalla, the diverse town on the edges of Mosul where Hormuz had worked as a taxi driver.

"First, we fled towards Al-Qosh," another Christian town further north, he told AFP.

But as the jihadists kept up their pillaging of Nineveh, they escaped to Arbil, the capital of the Kurdish region.

With his wife Afnan, 48, and their four children -- Natalie, 7, Nores, 15, Franz, 16, and Fadi, 19 -- they lived in a church for a month before renting an apartment at $150 per month for nearly three years.

That severely strained their finances.

Three years later, Iraq's military declared it had freed Bartalla from IS's grip. The Hormuz family was elated and rushed back to resume life in their hometown.

But they found their home had been torched and ransacked, and that members of the Hashed al-Shaabi, a powerful state-sponsored paramilitary network formed from mostly-Shiite armed groups and volunteers to fight IS, now controlled Bartalla.

"We lived in fear. There were checkpoints and militias everywhere. Once, they even asked my wife to wear a veil," said Hormuz.

"So I decided to sell everything, even my car, and move to Jordan," he told AFP.

They have lived in a two-bedroom apartment in Amman since February 2018, hoping to be resettled permanently in Canada, where he and his wife have family connections.

With Covid-19 slowing down all international travel, the immigration process has been indefinitely frozen as their savings dwindle further.

Registered as a refugee in Jordan, Hormuz does not have the right to work legally and relies on soup kitchens at Amman's few churches to keep his family fed.

"I hope that through his visit to Iraq, the pope will ask countries receiving Christian refugees to help us," he said.

"Going back to Iraq is out of the question."

- Exile and rebirth -

Many in Chaldean Bishop Saad Sirop Hanna's parishes in Sweden feel the same way.

Born in Baghdad, Hanna, 40, was sent in 2017 to lead Europe's largest Chaldean congregation of around 25,000 people, who had arrived in Sweden in waves over the past four decades.

He lived through much of the violence they had fled, describing it as "great chaos."

In 2006, he was kidnapped after presiding over mass in the Iraqi capital.

"I was held and went through lots of experiences -- including torture and isolation," Hanna told AFP.

"This experience also gave me strength, truth be told. I was born again. I look at life again with a great blessing and a great love," he said.

There are more than 140,000 Iraqi-born residents in Sweden, including Raghid Benna, a native of Mosul who resettled in the eastern town of Sodertalje in 2007.

"There are so many Chaldeans here that I don't even feel like I'm in exile," said Benna, a father of two.

For Sally Fawzi, 38, who was resettled in the US as a refugee in 2008, memories of home can be painful.

"My family was devastated in 2007 when we learned that my two great aunts in Kirkuk had been stabbed to death at night in their home just because they were Christians," she told AFP.

"Today, I have a house, a beautiful family of my own, a job, and my immediate family live in the same city, but I miss my Baghdad house and friends the most," Fawzi said.

"It will never be the same."

- From bloodshed to bankruptcy -

As young families escape Iraq, they often leave their older relatives behind, said Warda of the Hammurabi Human Rights Organisation.

"A Christian family was typically five members. Now it's down to three," he said.

In Baghdad, the once-thriving community of 750,000 Christians has shrunk by 90 percent.

Among them is Younan al-Farid, a priest who has stayed on in the capital even after his brother emigrated to Canada and his sister to the United States.

With fewer worshippers, "up to 30 percent of Iraq's churches closed," Farid told AFP.

After nearly two decades of bloodshed and bombings, Iraq entered a period of relative calm following IS's territorial defeat in late 2017.

But that hasn't stopped the flight of minorities.

"People are still leaving. Christians are just trying to save up enough money, and then as soon as they can, they emigrate," said Farid.

The country's parlous economy is the main driver of emigration now, Christians across the country told AFP.

The pandemic triggered a worldwide recession, and Iraq faced the additional challenge of collapsing oil prices, which slashed state revenues from crude sales.

That has led to delays or cuts in public sector salaries in federal Iraq as well as the autonomous Kurdish region, where many Christians still live.

"I only receive one salary every two months, and sometimes not even the full salary," lamented Haval Emmanuel, a Chaldean government worker originally from northern Iraq.

"As soon as I get paid, I have to pay debts from the preceding weeks and then I have nothing left."

- An 'angel', meeting 'demons' -

Emmanuel grew up in Iraq's southernmost city of Basra, then married and lived in Baghdad until 2004, when a bomb detonated outside the school his children attended.

Now grown, one of his daughters has emigrated to Norway with her husband, and his brother and sister have each moved their families to Lebanon.

Emmanuel, his wife and their three other children are eking out a living in Arbil as they await a response for their own resettlement requests.

"We're suffocating: there's no social care, no health services, no public schools, no work," he told AFP at his modest home near Arbil's Chaldean Archdiocese.

It irked him to see the lack of public services in oil-rich Basra, piles of rubbish disfiguring Baghdad's historic Rasheed Street, or posters of late Iranian supreme leader Ruhollah Khomeini in squares and streets in southern Iraq.

"It's supposed to be a public place, but it makes me feel like I have no place here," said Emmanuel.

"If they open everything up, I guarantee that by tomorrow, there won't be any Christians left. At least abroad, we will finally feel respected as humans."

The economic downturn, the poor quality of life, the shrinking space for minorities -- Emmanuel blamed it all on an entrenched political class seen as deeply corrupt.

And there's little the pope can do to change that.

"The pope is like an angel coming down on Iraq, but how many demons will he find here? A man of peace visiting a group of warlords -- how could he change them?" he said.

"We're expecting the pope. But we're not expecting much from his visit."

© 2021 AFP

Dozens of whales strand at notorious New Zealand bay

Issued on: 22/02/2021 - 

AFP 



Wellington (AFP)

Rescuers were racing Monday to save dozens of pilot whales that beached on a stretch of New Zealand coast notorious for mass strandings, wildlife officials said.

The Department of Conservation (DOC) said the pod of 49 long-finned pilot whales was found early Monday at Farewell Spit, about 90 kilometres (55 miles) north of the South Island tourist town of Nelson.

By mid-afternoon, nine of the whales had died and more than 60 people were working to keep the survivors alive for an attempt to refloat them at high tide, the DOC said.

"Marine mammal medics will assist with refloating the whales and caring for them on the beach, keeping them cool and wet until they can be refloated," a DOC spokeswoman said.

Farewell Spit is a 26-kilometre hook of sand that protrudes into the sea at Golden Bay.

It has been the scene of at least 10 pilot whale strandings in the past 15 years, the most recent in February 2017, when almost 700 of the marine mammals beached, resulting in 250 deaths.

Scientists are unclear as to why the beach is so deadly, although one theory is that the spit creates a shallow seabed in the bay that interferes with the whales' sonar navigation systems.

Ted Cruz buried under avalanche of scorn for 'sad' photo-op to prove he cares about storm-ravaged Texans

Tom Boggioni



In what can only be described as a desperate attempt at damage control after being busted for flying off to sunny Cancun while his constituents were freezing in storm-ravaged Texas, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) posted pictures of himself loading water into cars on Twitter Saturday night with the hashtag #TexasStrong.

Cruz has taken a beating from both sides of the aisle for accompanying his family for a quickie vacation as Texans statewide were trying to survive without water and heat in the freezing cold, and has since apologized. Cruz has also been shown up by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) who raised millions for struggling Texans and then flew down to the state to help with relief efforts.

Needless to say, few on Twitter were buying what Cruz was selling and they let him know it -- as you can see below:

00:2202:03

Houston mayor says Texas should pay some consumers’ massive utility bills

Published: Feb. 21, 2021

By Mike Murphy


Sen. Ted 'CANCUN' Cruz calls for regulation, governor forces halt to utility bills


Icicles hang off the a sign on State Highway 195 Killeen, Texas, on Thursday. GETTY IMAGES


Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said Sunday that the state of Texas should pay the massive utility bills some Texas consumers are facing following last week’s historic winter storm that knocked out power and sent energy prices skyrocketing.

“For people getting these exorbitant electricity bills and having to pay to repair their homes, they should not have to bear the responsibility,” Turner said during an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “Those exorbitant costs should be borne by the state of Texas and not the individual customers who did not cause this catastrophe this week.”

Some customers in Texas’ deregulated energy market were shocked to see they had been charged thousands — even tens of thousands — of dollars for energy use over the past week. One man was charged $16,752 on his electricity bill, the New York Times reported, about 70 times the amount of his usual bill.

Utility companies were able to charge more because of massive demand during the cold weather as supplies were severely constrained due to closed roads and downed power lines, sending wholesale energy prices through the roof.

Last week, CFO Roland Burns of Texas natural-gas company Comstock Resources Inc. CRK, +3.50% drew ire during an earnings call, saying “This week is like hitting the jackpot with some of these incredible prices.”

Houston’s mayor is not the only politician saying consumers should not be on the hook for the massive bills.

“This is WRONG,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, tweeted Sunday. “No power company should get a windfall because of a natural disaster, and Texans shouldn’t get hammered by ridiculous rate increases for last week’s energy debacle. State and local regulators should act swiftly to prevent this injustice.” Cruz had previously been an outspoken advocate of Texas’ energy system.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbot on Sunday barred utility companies from billing customers or cutting off power for non-payment following an emergency meeting with state lawmakers, the Texas Tribune reported.

“Texans who have suffered through days of freezing cold without power should not be subjected to skyrocketing energy bills,” Abbott said Sunday in San Antonio, adding that the billing moratorium will give the state time to figure out a way to protect consumers.

President Joe Biden declared Texas a major disaster area Saturday, opening a spigot of federal emergency funds. Biden may visit Texas later this week.

While the cold snap has broken — Houston hit a high of 69 on Sunday — some areas of Texas were still without power, and water shortages persist across the state after ice ruptured water mains. At least 76 deaths across multiple states have been blamed on the winter storm.

Gas Traders Pleaded for Cash as Texas Cold Upended Their Market

Naureen Malik, Gerson Freitas Jr, Michael Tobin and Rachel Morison
Sun, February 21, 2021,

(Bloomberg) -- The urgent phone calls came over the holiday weekend: traders of natural gas needed more money, and fast.

Temperatures were starting to plummet across the central U.S. Prices for the heating fuel had skyrocketed 300-fold to levels nobody had thought possible. This would later prove to be the precursor of one of the worst energy crises the nation had seen, plunging millions into darkness for days amid a deadly deep freeze.

But on Saturday, traders in the relatively small and obscure world that is the physical gas market were singularly focused on one very big problem: exchanges were demanding more collateral because of the volatility. The traders had until Tuesday to come up with the cash or else they’d be forced to exit their positions and, in some cases, face potentially catastrophic losses.

The dire situation triggered a frenzy of round-the-clock meetings. One group of traders convened their first Saturday morning conference call since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008. The public holiday on Monday meant U.S. banks were closed, so -- desperate for money -- some market players turned to European parent companies that could deliver so-called margin payments on their behalf to the exchanges sooner. The cash showed up in different currencies, but it did the trick.

“I’ve been through a lot: The ‘98 and ‘99 power spikes in the Midwest, the California crisis” of 2000-2001, said Cody Moore, head of gas and power trading at Mercuria Energy America. “Nothing was as broadly shocking as this week.” One gas trader said in a message over the weekend his head was “still spinning.” Brian Lavertu, a trader in Texas’ power market, predicted prices were about to go “wild.”

That turned out to be an understatement. In what will go down as one of the most remarkable weeks in power and gas market history, gas soared as high as $1,250 per million British thermal units in some locations, electricity in Texas surged to its $9,000-per-megawatt-hour price cap and the state’s grid operator ordered the country’s biggest-ever forced blackout as the cold pushed its system to the brink of total collapse.

Winners will emerge -- like Jerry Jones, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Cowboys, whose gas company sold some fuel for high premiums. There will most undoubtedly be losers. Atmos Energy Corp., one of the largest independent suppliers of gas in the U.S., revealed Friday it’s looking to raise cash after committing to spend as much as $3.5 billion to secure fuel during the freeze. The company said it’s “evaluating a number of financing alternatives including available cash, short-term debt, long-term debt, and equity.” The markets may never be the same.

The world of physical gas is dominated by industrial buyers and sellers, trading firms and the odd hedge fund. The action revolves around matching demand in one corner of the vast U.S. energy network with supply in another. Players obsess over the weather that drives demand -- air-conditioning in the summer, heating in the winter.

Related: The Two Hours That Nearly Destroyed Texas’s Electric Grid

Gas trader Paul Phillips and his team at Denver-based Uplift Energy spent the week before last focused on the big freeze that had yet to reach Texas. Uplift advises gas producers, for a fee, on how to get the best price. It told clients to get ready.

Despite the mounting concern, benchmark Nymex futures -- the deepest, most liquid market for gas -- were relatively stable at just under $3 per million BTUs.

Futures, as their name implies, reflect expectations for future supply and demand -- in this particular case, out to March and beyond, but not the looming weekend. Instead it was in the spot market, where gas is bought and sold for immediate delivery, that the alarm started ringing.

Spot prices at the Oneok delivery hub in Oklahoma, for example, which had mostly been trading at a small but steady discount to Nymex, moved sharply higher on Wednesday, Feb. 10, to settle at $9. On Thursday they hit $60. By Friday, they briefly surpassed $500, a level previously undreamed of.

Physical gas sales contracts can require the buyer or seller to pledge collateral, such as a letter of credit, a kind of insurance in case bets go awry or if a company has a liquidity issue. Price gains typically mean more collateral, or margin, is needed.

But the spot gas price spikes now being seen were triggering truly outsized demands: According to one trader, a small market participant with a margin requirement of $100,000 saw that balloon to $1 million. Larger companies had to find tens of millions of dollars. Many spot gas trades are conducted via next-day contracts on Intercontinental Exchange Inc., which boosted its margin requirements.

After the market closed Friday, stunned traders scrambled to work out how much additional funds they would need to set aside for the following week. Some trading houses were extremely nervous. An executive at one said he was worried that some counterparties could go bust and leave his firm with positions to fill on the spot market.

There were also more practical considerations as the weather closed in. Mercuria made the decision to book hotel rooms for some of its Houston employees so they could avoid driving in icy conditions. “This is an exceptional time and our first priority was to do whatever we can to keep the grid moving, the gas flowing properly,” Mercuria’s Moore said.

Meanwhile key pieces of Texas’ energy infrastructure began to fail. Oil and gas wells stopped producing as liquids froze in pipes. By the night of Sunday, Feb. 14, it was apparent that Ercot, which oversees Texas’ power grid, might have to implement rolling blackouts.

Some traders looking to raise more collateral urgently tapped credit lines, while lenders sprang into action. One bank was able to extend credit facilities by $500 million and have them in place when the markets reopened, according to a person working there. Other lenders also took similar action, according to other people with knowledge of the situation. “Nobody wanted to trade a liquidity event, so they stepped up,” one banker said.

By the morning of Tuesday last week, Texas was plunged into an unprecedented energy crisis, with Ercot unable to restore most of the grid. As markets reopened, some traders liquidated their positions, unable to post the additional margin.

“If you want to play, you’ve got to pay,” said John Kilduff, trader and founding partner at Again Capital. “It’s a mechanism to wring out excessive speculation.”

For those still in the game, the wild ride continued. By Wednesday, spot prices had surged at Henry Hub in Louisiana, the delivery benchmark for Nymex futures, while rates at Oneok touched $1,250.

Working from home, Phillips and his co-workers at Uplift saw orders filled in the Western Rockies at prices as high as $350. “I thought maybe the highest we could get was $20 this week, to be honest,” he said.

Some of Uplift’s clients were doing everything they could to keep the gas flowing at this point amid the frigid temperatures, using space blankets and portable heaters to stop pipes from freezing. “Some of our producer clients felt morally obligated that the gas was flowing,” Phillips said.

In Oklahoma, Chris Bird’s company Exponent Energy, was using similarly improvised measures, including a propane gas torch, to keep its gas wells from freezing. In just five days, Exponent’s wells in Osage County raked in about $3 million of revenue, compared with around $800,000 for the whole of last year.

As awareness grew of the sky-high cost of gas, outrage grew, even within the gas market. Some observers questioned why fuel was still flowing to liquefied natural gas export terminals when power was still down for millions of Texans.

“What is happening is a disgusting price-gouging that we have not seen since the California energy crisis,” said John Woods, an independent trader, referring to the spot prices. “Texas should ban the export of fuel.”

By late afternoon Wednesday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced during a televised address that he had stopped the shipment of gas from the state.

That created a fresh wave of panic in the market. Traders frantically sought clarification on how the order would be enforced. One trader on the West Coast who had been working around the clock lost $1 million within minutes, having earlier bought a gas swap priced at $20 -- essentially betting on continued supply constraints in Texas -- only to see the price fall to $12 immediately after news of Abbott’s order broke.

At the peak of the power outages, close to 4 million Texans were cut off, but by Thursday Ercot was having more success in reconnecting homes and businesses, and temperatures were beginning to recover. Gas supplies rebounded, too, and spot prices plunged. Oneok rates fell back to settle on Friday at $3.56 and Ercot ended emergency conditions.

While gas prices are almost back to where they started, the full repercussions of the wild ride will likely take a while to emerge. The hasty curbs on Texan exports may jeopardize the perception of how reliable U.S. LNG supplies could be in the future, said Katie Bays, managing director at FiscalNote Markets. Some financial losses in the U.S. market may only emerge toward the end of March, when billing comes due for February. Serious financial damage may end up raising the barriers for entry to the market, which in turn could reduce the amount of competition, said Kilduff at Again Capital.

“We’ll have to see what kind of defaults come to the surface,” he said. “That will dictate who can stay in.”

(Updates with details of Atmos Energy’s gas spending commitments in seventh paragraph)

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