With the subject of natural gas storage becoming a key topic as the industry continues its injection season, the battle to have adequate stocks by the time the country enters the winter heating season will rely on weather and gas-powered generation.

“This past winter we withdrew 1 Bcf or greater out of our storage assets 120 consecutive days,” said Carl Levander, vice president of Regulatory Affairs and Strategic Initiatives for Columbia Gas Transmission Corp. “That’s the longest contiuous run we have ever had going all the way back to the mid-seventies.”

Speaking at GasMart/Power 2003 in New Orleans, Levander added that the first four months of the 2002-2003 winter season set records for withdrawals on the Columbia system. Of the top 10 record withdrawal months on its system since 1976, November placed ninth, December came in fifth, January ranked second and February was seventh. The winter also saw Columbia Gas Transmission issue its first and second operational flow orders in history, back-to-back.

Levander said one of the major problems this last winter was the absence of accurate weather forecasting. He said many daily forecasts were wrong, but they were almost never warmer than expected.

As spring becomes firmly entrenched in most regions of the East, Levander said he believes the Eastern region will have to inject approximately 7.3 Bcf/d to be able to withstand the 2003-2004 winter demand. That projection could be tough to live up to if history is any indicator. During the 2001 injection season, the East region injected approximately 7 Bcf/d. However, in 2002 the region only chipped in 5.2 Bcf/d.

For this coming summer, temperatures across the United States are likely to be normal to warmer-than-normal, according to Citigroup Global Markets meteorologists Jon Davis and Mark Russo (see Daily GPI, May 6). The forecasters noted that they’re not expecting an unusually hot summer, unlike what occurred last year.

Noting that the storage injection situation can be tracked to a point, Levander said “what we don’t know is what the weather is going to be and what the result on power generation will be.”

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