Southern Natural Gas last week sought FERC clearance to begin delivering natural gas over new pipeline looping facilities on Sept. 1 to meet the expanding demand of industrial and power generation customers in the Southeast.

The El Paso Corp. pipeline subsidiary informed the Commission last Monday that it had completed the construction of Phase One of its South System Expansion II, which adds 67.8 miles of pipeline looping and 51,650 horsepower (hp) of new compression to its 8,200-mile, 2.83 Bcf/d delivery system that extends from Texas to Florida and Georgia.

All of the new loop pipelines were due to be interconnected with Southern Natural’s existing system by last Wednesday; final cleanup of the right-of-way was in progress, and FERC environmental inspectors were scheduled to carry out their final inspection, wrote R. David Hendrickson, associate general counsel for the company, in a letter to FERC.

The Phase One facilities will deliver 191,845 Mcf/d of gas to eight customers, including Southern Company Services, SCANA Resources Inc., Calpine Energy Services LP, Effingham County Power LLC, the City of Austell, GA, Morgan Stanley Capital Group, Procter & Gamble Paper Products Co. and Kimberly-Clark Corp.

In Effingham County, Progress Energy on Wednesday fired up its newly completed 480 MW, natural gas-fired power plant facility, located near Rincon, GA. The plant will receive some of its gas through Southern Natural’s South System Expansion II.

Known as the Effingham County Energy Complex, the plant is located about 20 miles northwest of Savannah and is Progress Energy’s 38th plant site. The combined-cycle power plant consists of two combustion turbines that operate in conjunction with equipment that captures exhaust heat and converts it to additional electrical output. Progress Energy said this technology significantly increases the efficiency of the plant.

Phase Two of the Southern Natural’s project, which is expected to be completed in May 2004, calls for the construction of 46.4 miles of pipeline looping and the addition of 13,010 hp of compression. This would create approximately 138,046 Mcf/d of added pipeline capacity.

Both phases primarily are targeted at markets in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi.

Southern Natural placed an earlier expansion project into service in mid-2002. In total, the three projects will add 700 MMcf/d of new firm transportation capacity to the pipeline’s system by mid-2004. Two of the expansions were to focus on the pipeline’s southern system and one more on its northern line. The projects will serve mainly 5,500 MW of new gas-fired power generation in the Southeast. They will bring Southern Natural’s total firm transportation capacity to approximately 3.4 Bcf/d.

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