Dominion said Wednesday it will spend $253 million on expansion of its natural gas gathering, processing and liquids facilities in West Virginia. The project is intended to increase efficiency and reduce high pressures in the system, enabling more gas from local producers to be moved through the system.

The company said it will complete three compression units currently under construction and, over the next three years, add nine new units. Approximately 25 miles of replacement or new pipeline will be constructed at various places in its gathering system to address bottlenecks and increase delivery. Two gas processing plants will be added, increasing Dominion’s West Virginia processing capacity from approximately 230 MMcf/d to 280 MMcf/d. The project is expected to be complete by fourth quarter 2012 and will be paid for by producers in their rates.

The project includes nine planned units totaling approximately 7,000 hp to be installed over the next three years in Harrison, Doddridge, Lewis, Gilmer and Kanawha counties; a 10 MMcf/d processing plant in Pleasants County; a 40 MMcf/d processing plant in Lewis County; and a 60,000-gallon-per-day expansion of the Hastings Extraction Plant in Wetzel County.

In September Dominion said it is targeting the Appalachian Basin with a $600 million pipeline project that would carry shale and traditional gas production from West Virginia and southwestern Pennsylvania to storage fields and pipelines in Pennsylvania (see Daily GPI, Sept. 29).

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