A cold blast gripping the US South threatens to bring record-breaking snowfall to New Orleans and Houston and a deep freeze that endangers oil and natural gas output and electrical grids. Snow is set to start late Monday in Houston and as much as 4 inches (10 centimeters) may fall by Tuesday, which would be a record for January, the National Weather Service said. New Orleans may get 5 inches, an all-time high for the region. Louisiana’s capital Baton Rouge might see 7 inches. Extreme cold warnings stretch from North Dakota to West Texas. “It’s a significant storm for so far south,” said Tony Fracasso, a senior branch forecaster at the US Weather Prediction Center. “It looks like almost the entirety of Texas has some chance of wintery precipitation.” Frigid temperatures will ride in behind the snow, potentially shaking oil and natural gas production in the short term while sending electricity demand soaring. As the freeze gripped West Texas Monday morning, temperatures in Odessa — the middle of the oil-rich Permian basin — had only reached 19F (10.5 C) and are set to drop to 15F overnight. Cold can disrupt oil and gas output by causing water in wells and pipelines to freeze. The Texas grid has a weather watch in place for Monday and Tuesday — an early alert that extreme cold driving up heating needs may strain supplies. Peak electricity demand will climb the next two days to top 77.2 gigawatts on Jan 23, according a recent forecast by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the grid operator. Projections have been volatile and at times have shown demand may test the winter record of 78.3 gigawatts set last January. Ercot said it expects to have enough supply to meet demand. Plunging temperatures have also triggered grid warming from extreme cold into the Midwest to the mid-Atlantic and the Northeast. PJM Interconnection, which operates the largest US grid from Washington DC to Illinois, on Sunday issued a “low voltage alert” that extends through Thursday. Washington’s high is forecast to only reach 26F, but winds will make it feel much colder — a chill that forced the presidential inauguration to be moved indoors. Amtrak canceled several trains across the US West and South, the federally funded rail carrier said on its website. More than 430 flights around the US were scrubbed and another 1,788 were delayed, airline tracking service FlightAware said as of 9:45 a.m. in New York. Fracasso said the snow will sweep across Texas late Monday into Louisiana overnight and then onto Mississippi and Alabama by Tuesday. By midweek it will have reached the North Carolina coast and perhaps even spread into southern Virginia before heading out to the Atlantic Ocean.
