CIG noted Friday that unseasonably cold weather had moved into its Front Range market region and was predicted to continue into this week. “With the high market demands anticipated for this period combined with high firm transportation load factors, CIG is concerned that our ability to absorb imbalances related to underdeliveries at receipt points or overdeliveries at delivery points will be limited to a significant degree,” it said. “Therefore, CIG expects operators to manage their confirmations to match flow rates to scheduled quantities, factoring in freeze-offs and other conditions as necessary, particularly while the cold weather impacts CIG’s field and pipeline operations.” At locations that are not flowing at scheduled rates, the pipeline plans to place underperformance caps during the scheduling process to reduce nominations to match such flow rates. No Notice shippers should anticipate that CIG will be able to support a maximum of 100,000 Dth/d of authorized delivery overruns, it said.

Cold weather in its service area induced MRT to declare a System Protection Warning effective with the start of Saturday’s gas day. The warning is subject to these conditions: MRT will not schedule any Main Line IT or AOR volumes for delivery north of Glendale, AR; fFirm volumes will be limited to their primary direction of flow; and MRT will not schedule volumes that result in a daily short position. Saying it has capacity available on the East Line, MRT encouraged shippers who were relying on Main Line IT and/or AOR supplies to resource supply to the East Line or reduce applicable delivery volumes in order to avoid OFOs.

Southwest Gas declared a “hold to burn notice” Friday due to forecasts predicting extremely cold weather for the LDC’s Las Vegas service area over the weekend, according to a posting on the Kern River bulletin board. Southwest “requests your immediate cooperation to limit actual takes to not exceed scheduled supplies. Also, negative daily nominations for imbalance paybacks from Southwest to customers have been eliminated” effective with last Friday’s gas day, the notice said. “An OFO may be invoked at a stage determined at the time of declaration if/when it becomes necessary. By working together, the OFO may be avoided.”

Citing weather forecasts and a jump in anticipated demand beginning Tuesday, Algonquin urged all shippers and point operators to carefully review demands for gas and schedule consistent with daily needs, and to tender and receive gas consistent with confirmed nominations. The pipeline said it “believes that if shippers and point operators limit due-pipe imbalances to 2% or less of scheduled deliveries to actual deliveries, the necessity of enforcing restrictions…to maintain service to firm customers will be avoided.” However, Algonquin plans to take further actions “if necessary to protect system integrity and prevent impairment of firm service.” It anticipated that beginning Monday imbalance gas will not be allowed to be taken off the system until further notice. It also anticipated that due-shipper imbalance make-ups and/or due-pipe imbalance creation will not be allowed.

Columbia Gas said Monday will be deemed a “Critical Day” in Market Areas 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 26, 27, 32, 35, 36, 38, 39 and 40. Based on forecasted markets, available facilities and capacity utilization, the pipeline projects that all capacity in the affected areas will be required to meet firm service obligations, leaving zero nonfirm capacity available. The Critical Day designation will be expanded Tuesday to Market Areas 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39 and 40, Columbia said.

Transco plans to make repairs starting Tuesday to a section of pipe in Eugene Island Block 135 on its Southeast Louisiana Lateral that was damaged during the 2005 hurricanes. Transco said that with favorable weather, it expects to return the line to service Jan. 31. During the outage no nominations will be accepted at the Eugene Island 100/105A, 105D and 107 meters.

Florida Gas Transmission reported finishing repairs to a “minor flaw” in its mainline just upstream of Galveston Bay in Texas (see Daily GPI, Jan. 11) and said it would be scheduling up to normal volumes (300,000 MMBtu/d) in Zone 1 starting with Intraday 1 nominations during Friday’s gas day. FGT also said it will begin maintenance Jan. 22 on a unit at Compressor Station 6 in Orange County, TX. The outage is expected to last through the end of January. During this work FGT will schedule up to about 225,000 MMBtu/d through the station; in normal operations FGT schedules up to 300,000 MMBtu/d.

Saying it was responding to expressions of interest, CIG is holding a binding open season through Feb. 12 for capacity on proposed new pipeline facilities extending from the Cheyenne Hub area in Weld County, CO, to interconnections with the distribution facilities of Public Service Co. of Colorado; to the facilities of Young Gas Storage in Morgan County, CO; and to a proposed storage facility in Adams County, CO. The proposed facilities will be called the High Plains Pipeline, CIG said. See the bulletin board for further details.

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