Spectra Energy’s Texas Eastern Transmission (Tetco) brought its Team South pipeline expansion online at full capacity this week, transporting 300,000 Dth/d of natural gas from the Marcellus and Utica shales to two delivery points in Mississippi nearly two months ahead of schedule.

Spectra spokeswoman Marylee Hanley confirmed to NGI that the expansion was placed into service on Monday at full capacity. “We’re really pleased that we’re able to bring additional volumes into the region, providing clean, reliable, safe and domestic natural gas,” she said Thursday.

Tetco launched an open season for the project last November and proposed an in-service date of Nov. 1, 2014 (see Daily GPI, Nov. 18, 2013). But the company added that it would try to bring the pipeline into service earlier, depending on how well the open season fared.

The Team South project called for providing firm transportation capacity for gas from the Marcellus and Utica regions of Ohio, West Virginia and southwest Pennsylvania to market.

Specifically, the project called for using multiple existing and proposed receipt points on the Tetco system that span a portion of the company’s 30-inch diameter pipeline in its M2 Market Zone, located west of its compressor station at Uniontown, PA. The two delivery points — along Tetco’s 30-inch diameter mainline, in its highly liquid ELA Access Area Zone — are the Kosciusko (Kosci) Compressor Station and the Southeast Supply Header (SESH), in Mississippi’s Attala and Copiah counties, respectively.

“We saw what we believe to be the Team South come online on Monday,” Genscape analyst Rick Margolin told NGI on Thursday. “Flows on Tetco through their Holbrook compressor, just west of Uniontown, jumped from a net 5 MMcf/d flowing west-to-east in August, to net 243 MMcf/d flowing east-to-west since Sept. 1.”

Margolin added that it didn’t appear that Team South was being fed by new production.

“Appalachia regional sample production volumes since Sept. 1 have averaged 16.1 Bcf/d, versus 16.03 Bcf/d during the month of August,” Margolin said. “It looks like gas is just [being] reshuffled.

“Within M2, total average receipts from all supply sources since Sept. 1 are even with August at 3.91 Bcf/d. Gathering receipts are actually down by almost 100 MMcf/d, but increases in receipts from processing plants and interconnects are up enough to offset those gathering declines.”

The project also called for building additional facilities at Tetco’s existing compressor stations, thereby boosting deliverable capacity to 200,000 Dth/d at the Kosci point and 100,000 Dth/d at the SESH point.

Another project at Tetco — Team 2014, which would add 600,000 Dth/d of incremental transportation capacity on the company’s northern Penn-Jersey system to markets in the Northeast, Midwest, Southeast and Gulf Coast — is expected to come online on Nov. 1 (see Daily GPI, May 7; Feb. 12).

Earlier this week, Dominion said it is partnering with Duke Energy, Piedmont Natural Resources and AGL Resources to build the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (see Daily GPI, Sept. 2). The 1.5 Bcf/d, 550-mile system would transport Appalachian Basin gas from West Virginia to North Carolina, traversing Virginia in the process.