Los Banos Rotary Club History
Rotarians See Construction Film

An exceptionally fine film showing the construction of the huge gas line that was built last year to bring natural gas from the Texas and New Mexico oil fields to California, was shown Tuesday noon. The film, in Technicolor, showed in detail the complete construction of the pipe line, from the manufacture of the 30-inch high pressure steel pipe to its final installation.
The film was shown by C. M. Croughan, of Santa Cruz, a gas engineer with the Coast Counties Gas and Electric Co. Croughan said the line was started in February of last year and was finished last October, at a cost of $83,000,000. The line starts in Texas and ends in Los Angeles, 1204 miles away. It crosses 10 rivers, several mountain ranges and two major desert areas.

Thirteen large compressors are stationed along the line to force the gas along at an operating pressure of more than 800 pounds per square inch. In explaining the tremendous amount of gas that is transported through the pipe, Croughan said the daily load weight of gas through the line was more than 15,000,000 pounds and in daily energy was the equivalent of 51,000 barrels of oil, 189 carloads of coal, or the electrical output of Hoover dam multiplied by six.

Before construction of the pipe line the major portion of the natural gas from the Texas and New Mexico oil country was wasted into the air, the refineries merely capturing the liquid oil that came out of the earth with the gas. The new gas supply, Croughan added, was needed in southern California where previously adequate supplies of natural gas had been depleted.
A similar pipe line is now being considered from the Texas fields to serve northern California.

January 18, 1949

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