Failure

While electricity deregulation in Virginia has been a widespread failure to this point, a new survey released this week showed that an astounding 85% of Virginians want to have the option to choose an electricity supplier.

Questar said Friday it has been informed that repairs to Greasewood Compressor Station, which experienced a mechanical failure Dec. 16 (see Daily GPI, Dec. 19) will not be completed until Jan. 8.

The omission of price thresholds in the 1998 and 1999 deepwater Gulf of Mexico oil and natural gas leases is “an example of bureaucratic bungling” at its worst, and the failure by Minerals Management Service (MMS) employees to report the oversight to superiors when they first detected it in 2000 stems from a “culture of irresponsibility” that pervades the Interior Department agency, Interior Inspector General Early Devaney told a House Government Reform subcommittee last Wednesday.

Despite the projected loss of billions of dollars to the federal government, the failure of certain Interior Department employees to include price thresholds in deepwater oil and gas leases in 1998 and 1999 does not rise to the level of criminal activity, the department Inspector General Earl Devaney told a House Government Reform subcommittee Wednesday.

Trailblazer declared a force majeure at its compressor station 602 in Lincoln County, NB on Monday. The station experienced an unexpected outage due to an internal electrical failure on one of its compressor units. The estimated duration of the outage is four weeks. Effective on the Intraday 1 cycle for Tuesday and continuing until further notice, secondary out-of-path and ITS/AOR volumes will not be available for scheduling. Trailblazer estimates that 800,000 Dth of firm capacity will be available during the outage. Therefore, nominated primary firm and secondary in-the-path firm transportation will be scheduled pro rata based on the shipper’s primary contract MDQ in accordance with Trailblazer’s tariff. Trailblazer expects to be able to confirm 94.5% of total contracted MDQ for primary firm transportation.

Energy legislation proposed by the House Republican leadership Wednesday has come under attack by chemical producers for its failure to include anything that would increase natural gas supply and moderate prices.

A “classic example” of the country’s “failure to plan is New England and, frankly, the whole Northeast. We just aren’t doing it right,” FERC Commissioner Nora Brownell said last Thursday in an appearance at the Platts Northeast Power Markets Forum in Arlington, VA.

Transwestern said Sunday it declared force majeure after experiencing a mechanical failure on Unit #1 at Crawford Compressor Station on the West Texas Lateral. Station capacity was reduced to about 32,000 MMBtu/d from the normal 60,000 MMBtu/d until the unit can be replaced. A replacement compressor will be available for service Thursday, Transwestern said, adding that it is working with customers to reroute affected gas to other receipt points.

The biggest disappointment of the newly-enacted energy bill is its failure to overturn the moratorium on oil and natural gas drilling in much of the federal Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), an American Gas Association (AGA) official said Friday.