FERC staff said it will prepare an environmental assessment (EA) for Tennessee Gas Pipeline‘s (TGP) Orion Project, a looping of the pipeline’s 300 Line that would target the Middle Atlantic and New England regions with additional service from Susquehanna County, PA, to Pike County, PA. The project’s 135,000 Dth/d of capacity is fully subscribed by South Jersey Resources Group LLC, South Jersey Gas Co., and Cabot Oil & Gas Corp., according to the Kinder Morgan Inc. pipeline (see Daily GPI, Oct. 9). More than two-dozen gas distribution systems, led by the Municipal Gas Authority of Mississippi have urged the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to require TGP to justify its proposal to charge system fuel and electric compression rates as part of the project (see Daily GPI, Nov. 16). Comments on the project are due at the Commission by Dec. 23 [CP16-4].

Calgary, Alberta-based Veresen Inc. plans to develop a $140 million ethane storage facility in Saskatchewan, and it said it has a 20-year contract with NOVA Chemicals Corp. to take the majority of the capacity. The facility on the Alberta-Saskatchewan border is close to the Empress, Alberta natural gas liquids processing facility and is expected to attract growing supplies of ethane from the Bakken Shale in North Dakota. The salt cavern facility will have a capacity of 1 million bbl of ethane and will be connected via pipeline to Veresen’s ethane gathering system in southeast Alberta. Assuming it gets timely regulatory approvals, the new storage facility is expected to be in service in the second half of 2018.