Southern Natural Gas has asked FERC for the go-ahead 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 on Monday that it has 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 will be interconnected with the existing system by Wednesday, Aug. 27…Final cleanup of the right-of-way is in progress, and the Commission’s environmental inspectors will be making their precommencement-of-service inspection [this week],” 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.

Phase Two of the 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 (see Daily GPI, June 25, 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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