FERC has issued a favorable environmental assessment (EA) of Sawgrass Storage LLC’s proposal to convert a depleted natural gas reservoir to an underground storage facility just west of Perryville in Lincoln and Union parishes in northeast Louisiana.

“Approval of the proposed project, with appropriate mitigating measures, would not constitute a major federal action significantly affecting the quality of the human environment,” the staff of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission concluded in the EA [CP11-523].

The storage project would have a working capacity of about 30 Bcf and would be capable of delivering and receiving gas at the rate of about 300 MMcf/d. The Sawgrass Storage field would be developed by converting the depleted South Downsville Field in northern Louisiana, which produced 50 Bcf of gas between 1961 and 1984 and was abandoned in 1985. The target storage zone is the Vaughn Sandstone of the Cotton Valley formation.

Sawgrass, a new entrant in the storage field, filed its application with FERC in late July (see Daily GPI, Aug. 12). It also proposes to build 13.9 miles of 30-inch diameter mainline pipeline extending northeast from the storage facility to an interconnection with the interstate system of Midcontinent Express Pipeline (MEP), about nine miles southeast of Farmerville, LA. Other facilities include five observation wells; 5.2 miles of 20- and 24-inch diameter gather pipeline; and a compressor station with approximately 19,000 hp of compression.

The company has asked the Commission to issue a certificate by Dec. 31 so that it can begin construction in March 2012. This would allow Sawgrass to place the project in service in March 2013, the storage developer said.

Sawgrass said it expects to begin providing firm and interruptible storage services and interruptible hub services (parking, loaning, balancing and imbalance trading) to shippers in the MEP production regions of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana at market-based rates by March 2013, assuming the project is approved by the Commission. The company held an open open season in late 2010 (see Daily GPI, Oct. 18, 2010).

Sawgrass is a venture of Mill Creek Gas Storage LLC, a subsidiary of Samson Investment Co., a privately held energy exploration and production firm; and Cypress Creek Gas Storage LLC, a subsidiary of Nicor Inc. of Naperville, IL.

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