East Tennessee Natural Gas has filed an amendment to its Patriot expansion-extension project to reflect the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA) decision to scrap its plans to build a 510 MW power generation facility in the state, as well as a decision by another customer — Cogentrix affiliate Henry County Power LLC — to delay the construction of its proposed 1,080 MW generation facility in Virginia.

In the amended application filed at FERC last Wednesday, the Duke Energy pipeline requested permission to scale back some of the Patriot facilities that it had proposed initially, absorb into Patriot certain facilities that had been certificated in a companion pipeline loop-compression project to serve the TVA, and to delay the timing of the construction of pipeline facilities to serve Henry County Power’s generation project by one year. Henry County Power now says it won’t need natural gas until Jan. 1, 2005.

As for the initial Patriot facilities, East Tennessee asked to remove 13.76 miles of pipeline loop of an unspecified diameter, 6.14 miles of 16-inch diameter pipeline uprate, and about 4,040 horsepower of compression. It also requested the okay to assimilate into Patriot an 8.7-mile, 20-inch pipeline loop, 1,590 hp of compression, and an uprate of 5.4 miles of 12-inch diameter pipe — all of which had been authorized by FERC for the companion TVA project.

When the figures are tallied, there is a “net reduction in the [combined] compression and looping facilities” that were originally proposed for the Patriot and the associated TVA projects, East Tennessee told FERC [CP01-415].

The Duke Energy pipeline asked the Commission to issue a final certificate for the amended project by Sept. 11 of this year. FERC awarded the Patriot expansion-extension a preliminary determination on non-environmental grounds in March, and a draft environmental impact statement in April. The Commission currently is conducting a final environmental review of the Patriot project.

Despite the changes to the project, East Tennessee said customer interest remains high. It estimated that 87% of the project’s 510,000 Dth/d capacity (446,000 Dth/d) still is under contract on a long-term basis. Patriot customers include NUI Energy Brokers Inc., Carolina Power & Light, Duke Energy Murray LLC, Public Service Company of North Carolina, Duke Energy Wythe LLC, United Cities Gas Co. and Henry County Power.

The Patriot project, estimated at $289 million, entails an expansion of East Tennessee’s existing mainline system in Tennessee and southwestern Virginia, and an extension running from central Virginia to an interconnection with Transcontinental Gas Pipe Line’s mainline in Rockingham County, NC. The extension is sized at 93 miles of 24-inch diameter pipe, while the expansion consists of 85 miles of looping. In connection with the project, a salt cavern storage facility is being developed by parent Duke Energy Gas Transmission and NUI Corp. in Saltville, VA, to bring added value and options to shippers subscribing to the extended transportation services.

The combined extension-expansion would boost East Tennessee’s existing design capacity of 700,000 Dth/d to more than 1.2 Bcf/d. The pipeline has proposed adding the capacity in three phases, with the initial in-service scheduled for May 2003.

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