Iroquois Gas Transmission announced a new open season for capacity on a proposed 22-mile pipeline lateral and said it received expressions of interest for about 805,000 Dth/d of firm capacity in its recent mainline open season. Both the lateral and any mainline expansion would begin service in November 2007.

The lateral that is being proposed would transport gas from the mainline near South Commack, NY, to the 350 MW Caithness Long Island power plant at Brookhaven, NY. The Caithness plant is a critical addition to the Long Island power grid. The Long Island Power Authority issued a draft environmental impact statement on the plant in March.

“They are looking for about 50,000 Dth/d at the power plant but if there is any other interest along the way obviously we could size the lateral accordingly,” said Iroquois’s Vince Morrissette, manager of business development. “It’s primarily residential through there, but there are potential other new power generation facilities that are being evaluated in the area but not on the timeframe we’re talking about; they would be beyond 2007.”

Morrissette said Iroquois recently announced a reverse open season on the mainline to see if any existing customers are interested in turning back mainline capacity. He said the March open season was designed mainly to respond to interest related to the proposed 500 MMcf/d Millennium Phase 1 project. Millennium will not be directly connected to Iroquois but customers will be able to access Millennium through a connection with Algonquin Gas Transmission. KeySpan previously announced it will be among the anchor shippers on Millennium Phase 1 with plans to purchase 150,000 Dth/d of capacity.

“We had several customers interested in incremental capacity from various receipt points,” said Morrissette. “We certainly don’t expect a 805,000 Dth/d expansion, but that was the sum of all the expressions of interest. Some interest was from Waddington all the way to New York, others were from Brookfield down, and other receipt points were nominated as well.

“We’ll announce the results probably in August at the latest. We’ll probably add a combination of compression and looping but it depends on the final volumes. We’re getting to the point where very soon we’ll have to start looping our system. We do still have some expansion capacity available via compression only.”

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