As a shivering North America closed out a week of brutal cold up North and unusual cold down South — with more to come over the weekend — reports of new peak day delivery records for natural gas pipelines were starting to trickle in.

Williams’ 10,500-mile Transcontinental Gas Pipe Line (Transco), which runs from South Texas to New York, charted a new peak-day delivery record of 9.25 million Dth last Sunday (Jan. 3). And the pipeline could be heading for another record as forecasts on Friday were calling for lower temperatures than last weekend, a spokesman told NGI.

“It’s possible we could set another record this week…it normally takes about a day or so for us to get all that information. If it happens this weekend we would know early next week,” said spokesman Chris Stockton.

Lows in the New York City area were predicted by the National Weather Service to be 22 degrees Fahrenheit Friday night and 15 degrees Saturday night, while highs Saturday and Sunday were expected to be in the high-20s. At the other end of the Transco system, lows in the Houston area were expected to be 20 degrees Friday night and 22 degrees Saturday night, with highs in the low- to mid-40s Saturday and Sunday.

New York’s Con Edison set all-time daily and hourly records for natural gas on use by residential and business customers on Jan. 3 (see Daily GPI, Jan. 8). The company delivered 967,908 Dth to its distribution customers, and a new hourly record at 11 a.m. EST by delivering 45,953 Dth through the distribution system. These broke the previous highest daily delivery of 957,879 Dth on Dec. 29, 2009, and the previous highest hourly delivery of 45,505 Dth on Jan. 17, 2000 at 9 a.m.

Additionally, New York-based interstate Millennium Pipeline LLC said Friday its one-year-old line set a new peak-day record of 714,700 Dth on Monday (Jan. 4). Gas carried by Millennium is sourced from western New York production and storage fields as well as interconnects with pipelines carrying gas from the Marcellus Shale as well as Canada.

The record-breaking deliveries on Transco surpassed the previous high of 8.91 million Dth, which was established on Feb. 5, 2009. The record volume represents enough gas to serve more than 40 million U.S. homes on an average day, Williams said. The company also established a new three-day delivery last Saturday through last Monday (Jan. 2-4), averaging 9 million Dth/d.

“This was a tremendous team effort that allowed us to quickly respond to our customers’ needs,” said Phil Wright, president of Williams’ natural gas pipeline business. “The majority of our market area experienced colder-than-normal temperatures, and our employees did a great job of responding to significant increases in demand.”

Five years ago Transco set throughput records Jan. 17 through Jan. 19, 2005 on the strength of a cold snap. The pipeline’s throughput averaged 8.3 million Dth/d (see Daily GPI, Jan. 26, 2005).

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