Mexico’s Comision Federal de Electricidad (CFE) awarded a 21-year contract to construct and operate the 30-mile, 16-inch diameter Hermosillo Gas Pipeline Branch to CFE Northeast Natural Gas, a unit of US Source Gas. The pipeline, expected to be online in November 2017, would carry gas from the Sasabe-Guaymas pipeline to the Herosillo gas-fired combined-cycle power plant in the state of Sonora. CFE Northeast bid US$12.95 million, beating the only other eligible competing bidder, Aguaprieta Gas Pipeline, a subsidiary of IEnova, Sempra Energy‘s Mexican business unit. Aguaprieta bid about $15.76 million. CFE had budgeted more than $50 million for the project. The 100 MMcf/d of transport capacity would be reserved for CFE.

San Francisco-based Trellis Energy, newly spun from Blackstone Technology Group, has launched a natural gas transaction platform to manage and automate critical processes used to produce, gather and deliver gas from pipelines to storage and end users behind citygate. Trellis also has absorbed Blackstone’s digital services practice to provide data analytics. The Trellis platform would manage “business processes throughout the natural gas supply chain, in a single-platform,” CEO Rakesh Agrawal said. Using a software-as-a-service model, Trellis would allow energy companies “the flexibility to choose either an on-premise or a hosted solution, based on their size, need and budget.” The company also has offices in Houston, Denver and Washington, DC.