chiefly because of the tremendous acceptance of gas for home heating winter demand often shoot up as high as fifteen times some requirements to gear our pipeline highway system to summer demand would make it impossible to serve all our customers on the coldest winter days so obviously that is not a practical solution we have to keep the gas flowing through our pipeline highway at full volume all during the summer distribute enough for summer needs and store the surplus as close to the population centers as possible to meet the heavy winter demand and you know that is the subject of this meeting where and how to store the tremendous amounts of natural gas needed to see our territory through a heavy winter only last week i was trying to make clear the enormity of the storage problem to my young grandson and since figures alone especially in the billions don't seem to impress him i resorted to a couple of simple illustrations i pointed out to him that sixteen houses on one square block of a residential community require two million cubic feet of natural gas to see them through a difficult winter to store that amount of gas takes the tank two hundred feet in diameter and over six stories high  city of say one hundred thousand requires approximately four billion cubic feet of gas during a single winter to store even one billion cubic feet of gas would require twenty tanks each as high as the empire state building therefore storage tanks are not the solution which leads right back to the original problem where can a sufficient supply of gas to meet our huge winter demand be stored they only possible answer seems to lie in nature itself placing the gas back into its natural store by pumping it into the same underground formation from which the original gas was withdrawn after all it was held safe here for millions of years throughout the summer we would fill the natural reservoirs from our pipeline system and then during the cold months withdraw the stored gas to supply a behavior needs of the consumer as you all know underground storage in depleted reservoirs has been tried and found practical on a small scale and there is our challenge gentlemen to make underground storage practical on a large scale large enough to meet the needs of our customers during even the severest winter and there it was that simple and that complicated simple because the basic idea was  complicated because there were of thousand on known factors to be worked out now why people rolled up their sleeves and went to work they examined the well records the field after field estimated  volume and determine whether the field was actually a closed reservoir they studied every detail of the gas producing strata in the most promising field calculating how fast the gas could be injected and how quickly it might be withdrawn then after seemingly endless and painstaking preparation my people moved into the field they recondition the hundreds of old well installing new casing them connections to withstand the great pressures needed to pump th stand back through the transmission line with measuring and regulating station here every last cubic foot of me is measured before i am allowed to pass on through the transmission line then on to the point where i am transferred from the big transmission lines and into the city distribution system known to my people as a city gate the great pressures under which i travelled in the big pipes are reduced and regulate for at key points throughout the system my rate of flow with constantly controls the demand for my services that are raised from hour to hour the focal point and nerve center for all the intricate vital control here in the headquarters dispensing room and through the actions of the dispatcher every well compressor station and storage field in the system is moving coordinated to the constantly changing consumer require it takes years of apprenticeship and more years of practice to properly interpret analyze and act upon the complex pipelines that science continues to provide better way and more and more automation is being put to work for me by means of it telling me to resist them but his back yard can pull dozens of regulator than valves without moving from his chair by the mere push of a button he valve on a line more than ninety miles away and of if that weren't enough the scientific marvel fans in the continuous record of operations from every control point everywhere i look these filling up the big pipeline the two pressure capacity in order to have a maximum supply available for the increased demand of a sudden cold crystallizes the strategy with which they plan to meet the increased demand brought on by the cold waves that are notified production and transmission superintendence they want to have radio equipped trucks and cars available at key points and fred can we get more gas in the southwest sun was available yesterday we're getting an additional seventy five million good how about our storage pools we're already withdrawing from all of them number six compressor station which we've had idle is now pumping that's about all we can do for now let's sit tight for the time being keep our eyes on the tele think about what they think coming over the teletype tell them there's no let up throughout the day and into the night temperatures keep on falling steadily by monday with to maintain adequate pressure the pressure on line before is holding well we're watching in case it drops out of sixty two line twenty four nine hundred twenty nine pounds increase your take from storage pools for there are still a countless new challenges ahead and still more uses for my talents to add to the twenty thousand already in existence the entire house comes with built in appliances and aside from the water heater and incinerator in this all gas home and best of all year round against air conditioning some are calling and winter heat or even though you associate me most logically with your home i have also won quite a name for myself in the exciting new world of that of course brings us right around full circle to the continuing need for news sources of supply but where is there left to search the people who serve me have several answers  part in making a complex system work smoothly and efficiently each has an interesting and vital job that makes him more than just the employee of a public utility knows that his job is important not