Surpassing the Tcf milestone again, San Diego, CA-based Sempra Energy’s Southern California Gas Co. utility unit racked up all-time records for sendout, receipts and storage in 2001, establishing new standards for its 135-year history. And this year, its officials estimate it will take more of the 12 months to fully implement the state-approved settlement for future unbundling of its in-state transmission and underground storage operations, making them closer to what happens on the Pacific Gas and Electric Co. natural gas system in the northern half of the state.

“Clearly, our system operations numbers in 2001 are the best we’ve ever had,” Lee Stewart, senior vice president for gas transmission in Sempra’s California utilities, said in a report to employees earlier this month.

SoCalGas’s 2001 sendout was 1.171 Tcf (trillion cubic feet), topping the prior record (1.141 Tcf) set in 2000; total gas receipts were 1.199 Tcf, topping the previous record (1.114 Tcf) set the year before; and deliveries to electric generating plants reached an estimated 564 Bcf level, 45 Bcf above the previous record set in 2000.

Based on price and supply crunches in the latter half of 2000, SoCal said its urged its largest customers to store as much gas as they could in 2001, and as a result the first half of last year, customers used “more than 99% of all the firm interstate capacity that brings gas into the SoCalGas system,” according to utility officials, who called it a “level of receipts unheard of” in the company’s long operating history.

This year the nation’s largest gas distribution utility is implementing a major interim settlement approved by the California Public Utilities Commission, allowing all of its largest (non-core) customers to buy firm, tradable rights at any of the utility’s receipt points. SoCal officials told their employees that the new rights are “more reliable than a system regulated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission,” giving the CPUC clear control.

The other parts of the unbundling include: (1) adding new options for customers including imbalance trading, a self-balancing or a daily balancing option and “pooling,” allowing marketers to nominate supplies into a pool rather than on behalf of a specific customer; and (2) adding storage options, including tradable rights.

“The [new approach] puts the CPUC in a far better position to address market conditions like the high gas prices we saw last winter at the California-Arizona border,” said Rick Morrow, vice president for customer service with major markets, in a report to SoCalGas employees. CPUC rules and regulations, Morrow said, rather that FERC, set transportation priorities at the border, and regulate the terms and conditions under which the rights can be sold and used.

“It offers the chance for lower overall natural gas costs and greater market certainty,” SoCal officials said.

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