Duration

Houston-based Eagle Rock Energy Partners said it has shut in “substantially all” of its East Texas oil and gas production for the duration of an unscheduled turnaround of the Eustace processing facility, which is owned and operated by Tristream Energy LLC.

Questions surrounding the duration of the nation’s near-term cold snap continued to unravel the recent strength in natural gas futures trading on Tuesday as the December contract dropped 16.6 cents on the day to close at $7.557. The January contract, which will take over prompt-month status in overnight Wednesday trading, shaved 20.4 cents on Tuesday to finish at $7.817.

Traders appeared to be reassessing the severity and duration of current cold weather in the Midwest and East on Tuesday as January natural gas made a feeble attempt higher before falling. The prompt month settled at $13.489, down 17.1 cents for the day, which brings the two-day decline to 44.2 cents.

Due to additional work required at Amber Station, CenterPoint will extend the duration of maintenance that began March 22 (see Daily GPI, March 14) through April 28, keeping station capacity (West 1 segment) limited to 330,000 Dth/d. The work, previously expected to end Friday (April 22), is causing curtailment of firm receipt capacity, but does not affect CenterPoint’s ability to make firm deliveries.

With expectations that storage will be full at the end of the injection season, futures market participants have said for weeks that the only thing that could stem the market downtrend was a strong Gulf hurricane. As the Minerals Management Service tallied more than 4 Bcf/d of shut-ins Tuesday caused by Category 4 Hurricane Ivan, these prognosticators appear to be right on.

Sonat has experienced another unscheduled outage of unknown duration at Olga Compressor Station in southeast Louisiana. It required a reduction in interruptible receipt (A-1 and/or IT) capacity on the 26-inch Main Pass Area line effective with Tuesday’s intra-day 1 cycle. The latest outage is the fourth in a series over the past couple of months (see Daily GPI, April 1, March 17 and Feb. 13).

Part of Line 1102 between the Plains and Dimmitt Stations has been shut down for unscheduled repairs, the duration of which is not yet known, El Paso said Thursday. The capacity of Line 1102 from Plains north was cut by 150 MMcf/d effective with Thursday’s Cycle 3 nominations until further notice. The remaining capacity is about 10 MMcf/d less than the average scheduled volumes so far in August, the pipeline said.