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Have you ever experienced the problem of building a new home or commercial building and needing to turn over the building to the new owners, but the natural gas line that was requested many months ago is still not in place yet? This is a very common problem that many general contractors face when buildings are finished. The new building owner needs to heat the building, create hot water, and in the case of a home also wash clothes, power a fireplace, and use the stove and none of this will get done.  This means that you cannot turn the house/commercial building over to the new owner.

This problem occurs for many different reasons, we know because Blue Gas Express is the mobile gas service used to solve all these needs until the permanent gas line gets to your building. In this article, we show you what is likely happening to your delayed service line construction, so we describe below the top reasons from the most frequent to the least.

Permit and Easement Delays:

Natural gas utilities are required to request many different types of permits in order to run the permanent gas line from the location that has an adequate capacity of gas to your building. Utility engineering will calculate the section of the gas network that has the best adequate gas supply to meet your building’s needs without disrupting gas flow to other customers that already have the gas turned on, so at times the service line for your street may need to come from quite a distance even if there is gas on another part of your street. It’s all about “adequate supply without disruption to existing customers.” The farthest away the line is from your building, the larger the number of problems it will encounter to get there and the higher the likelihood it will require a lot more permits to cross roads, cross creeks, having to go under existing driveways, and establish new easements alongside new roads and the worst of all having to cross a railroad. 

Anytime a natural gas line has to cross a road, a Dept of Transportation permit is required in that state. Permits can take anywhere from 1-3 months to be approved, however, if the natural gas line needs to cross a creek, in most jurisdictions, it will have to go 15 feet below the creek bed and that requires a special operation. For water streams it could require an environmental-impact study which will take MONTHS and only after that will they consider issuing a permit if the study does not see significant impacts to wild animals and the environment from all the digging and construction to support the main gas line.

If the study highlights issues, the natural gas line must be run in a different spot, or extra actions to mitigate or reduce the impact and that is going to take considerable engineering studies from the part of the utility to see if it is even feasible (adequate supply). Now you can start to see that even when a solution is found it will easily take 6 months for a line to cross to the other side of the creek. Not because it takes that much time to build it, but because the approvals are very time-consuming.

In areas where there are no established easements yet like new roads to new subdivisions or new industrial parks, these must be requested and approved by the municipality or area of jurisdiction and there is a wait time for them to determine whether to approve or modify the request. These are usually problematic when the easement overlaps on top of existing driveways, peoples’ personal or commercial property and at times the owners of those properties file lawsuits if the gas utility is not able to compensate them adequately and those lawsuits must be resolved before the easements are approved. In the meantime, your gas supply is on hold until Blue Gas Express provides the temporary gas service to your building by connecting directly to it with a mobile gas unit.

Although most of these problems cannot be avoided, the gas utility is good at finding solutions for these. Now you understand, the longer the length of the main gas line the greater the likelihood of more problems or barriers will exist and each barrier adds to the delay in permanent gas service. The gas utilities have realized that Blue Gas Express can solve all these problems immediately and they are our largest customers. While the gas utility solves the problems and brings the line to the building, we deliver mobile natural gas immediately to your building with our fleet of mobile gas units, which we manufacture and operate. We use the same gas that you will eventually receive in your permanent line, so you can commission appliances and calibrate them, achieve mechanical completion, receive the certificate of occupancy, and more importantly, turn over the building to the new owner. All this can happen while you wait for the permanent gas line to arrive.

Often the gas utility will tell you “We are only delayed by one month” because they don’t want you to panic, but often it is usually much longer than that because they don’t want to admit that parts of the process are outside of their control and therefore, they cannot estimate how long it really takes to solve through each of these problems. Covid and labor shortages have made these issues much worse, because of a reduction in productivity on the part of permit-issuing offices and the backlog of requests that the pandemic created.

Weather and Terrain obstacles:

Weather is another variable that is uncontrollable and can add weeks of delay while digging trenches or boring the ground to install natural gas. If the ground is too muddy it will cause the boring machine to fail as the tunnel created to insert the gas line will collapse before the line is in place. The only solution here is to abandon construction until the ground has drained most of the water content. If it rains every week, these projects could experience months of delays just waiting on proper drainage. Blue Gas Express often has to deliver our gas boxes and larger mobile gas units to areas that are mud pits because general contractors of commercial buildings cannot wait any longer for the weather to remain ideal for several weeks for the proper drainage to take place. They need gas for the building now. A similar problem occurs in the northern part of the US with permafrost and the inability to perform fast construction between weeks of very cold weather that turns the dirt into frozen rock.

Even if the weather is favorable, the terrain may not be. We have been called to provide our fast gas service when utility crews find bedrock and the boring machines that drill through dirt cannot perforate it, after all they are not mining crews and don’t drill through rock, so special mining equipment is required when this happens. Obviously, gas utilities don’t have that equipment on hand and there is usually a big delay to hire a mining crew and bring in specialized equipment for that purpose. Another example we experience is when a utility crew must cross under a commercial driveway built for large trucks. They build these concrete driveways with a lot of depth and reinforced it with so much rebar that cutting a deep channel in it can take weeks. These driveways must remain functional for large 18-wheelers to go in and out fully loaded and so the gas utility crew can only cut through these driveways on nights and weekends outside the business hours of the heavy trucking activity.

High Demand for natural gas services, but not enough utility personnel:

Natural gas is the most popular fuel to heat up a home or a building and the most cost-effective solution, so it’s no wonder that new construction and its recent boom in housing and commercial buildings have generated a huge number of requests for new gas lines. Natural Gas is easily much cheaper than electrical, propane, or heating oil. It is the standard fuel to heat homes, cook meals, run factories, and more. With this high demand, it is hard for construction crews to keep up with the backlog of requests for new natural gas lines. Blue Gas Express is often hired by the gas utilities when customers have requested a gas line so long ago and the utility knows that there is not enough construction personnel on hand to build the main lines anytime sooner, but they still know that eventually it will get done and want to retain that customer. An example is when we inject natural gas from our mobile gas units into a stranded pipeline that feeds only the homes in a new subdivision because the line in the subdivision will not be connected to the larger natural gas grid for a long time, but the houses or buildings have long been ready to transition to the new owners and be occupied. Gas utilities will often make promises of main gas lines to builders, so entire subdivisions are built with all the appliances running on natural gas. If they miss a deadline, Blue Gas Express is there to fulfill that need. We are often hired by the developers of subdivisions so that their model homes can be connected to our mobile gas units and they can showcase all the nice features of the homes during the selling process of all the parcels that will be developed.

These are just a few of the ways a temporary natural gas solution like Blue Gas Express is helpful to communities, commercial general contractors, residential general contractors, factories, building owners, and all gas utilities. If there is a need for natural gas now and the utility cannot meet it in time, Blue Gas Express provides this convenient service directly or through the utility and takes the pressure off the delayed construction of main gas lines. We make our units specifically for this purpose and they routinely save the day, hence we name them after superheroes, so we get a kick at saying “Wonder Woman saved that Amazon building”, or “Superman is full of gas at Walmart”.

Don’t Delay, Blue Gas Express provides temporary natural gas FAST, to those who need it NOW.

Call: (919) 238-3426

Ready to discuss your project? Send us your project needs HERE

The website, that is. The mixture of energy technology products at Blue Gas Express has grown so much that we decided to create its own dedicated website. Blue Gas Express is a division of Blue Gas Marine, Inc., where we make energy technology products for the marine industry, while Express focuses on solving the land-based side of energy problems.

Blue Gas Express has experienced phenomenal customer demand and it is growing at an accelerated pace. While the division is now 4 years old, the website is new and completely dedicated to the specific challenges of getting mobile gas units delivered fast, where customers need then most.

As a technology company, we are always looking to solve problems, so if you have one that needs an energy solution call or email us, we’d love to learn about it. Thank you for visiting our new website!

Miguel Guerreiro, CEO