Activity in British Columbia’s (BC) Horn River Basin has been contributing to leasing records in the province, spurring new pipeline proposals and a proposal for a new gas processing plant, which EnCana Corp. filed recently with provincial regulators.

EnCana is proposing to construct a processing facility in northeast British Columbia approximately 60 kilometers northeast of Fort Nelson, BC. The facility, called the Cabin Gas Plant, would have an initial processing capacity of 400 MMcf/d.

The projected final processing capacity is anticipated to be 2.4 Bcf/d once the area is developed. The project would be built in six phases with each phase having capacity of 400 MMcf/d. This is intended to time the project’s evolution with the region’s gas production growth, a spokesperson told NGI.

The first phase of Cabin is expected to be onstream in 2011 at a cost of about $400 million, and each subsequent phase is expected to be installed as production from the Horn River Basin comes on-line and demand for processing increases. The plant is an industry/producer-supported solution to processing gas from the Horn River Basin.

The remote Horn River Basin is just south of the province’s boundary with the Northwest Territories. Here, as in the Montney shale in north-central BC, unconventional plays are the order of the day (see Daily GPI, Dec. 22, 2008). The site of the Cabin plant would be more than 300 miles from the Tomslake, BC, area, where EnCana infrastructure has been the target of recent vandalism (see related story).

EnCana is proposing the Cabin plant on behalf of the Horn River Basin Shale Gas Producers Group. EnCana is one of the group’s eight members. EnCana has said its production from the basin could reach 1 Bcf/d.

©Copyright 2009Intelligence Press Inc. All rights reserved. The preceding news reportmay not be republished or redistributed, in whole or in part, in anyform, without prior written consent of Intelligence Press, Inc.