Imbalance

Reliant told shippers Wednesday that an Operational Alert has been lifted, so imbalance tolerances are back to normal (see Daily GPI, Dec. 21). Reliant also said it now expects an outage of the electric unit at Buckley Compressor Station north of Shreveport, LA (see Daily GPI, Dec. 14) to last through the end of February 2000.

Public Service Co. of Colorado and Cheyenne (WY) Light Fuel andPower will continue to refuse imbalance payback gas at leastthrough today’s gas day. If operational constraints from warmregional weather continue, the two utilities said, the paybackrestriction will be extended.

Pacific Gas & Electric continued a low-inventory OFO begunWednesday (see Daily GPI, Aug. 25)through today with no change in imbalance tolerance orpenalties. PG&E extended a projection of below-target linepacklevels through Saturday.

A high-inventory Stage 1 OFO implemented Sunday by Pacific Gas& Electric was continued through Monday and today. Sunday’s 15%imbalance tolerance was reduced to 6% Monday, but the noncompliancepenalty remains at $1/dth. PG&E projected that its linepackinventory would continue to be 200 MMcf or more above the utility’starget through Thursday.

Due to expected high storage injections over the Memorial Dayweekend, Columbia Gas Transmission is not accepting SIT or ISSinjections, imbalance paybacks or Maximum Daily Injection Quantityoverruns today through Monday. Upstream affiliate Columbia Gulf,which has no storage facilities, said Thursday it is not acceptingany payback gas through June 30. The pipe is finishing pigging oflaterals and preparing to begin mainline pigging operations, aspokesman said, so it wants to avoid any problems with excesssupplies.

Transco shippers have accumulated a significant negativeimbalance through the first 20 days of April, the pipeline said. Inorder to avoid restrictions that would be caused by a large volumeof receipt makeup transactions requested to flow for a limited timeat the end of the month, Transco urged that such transactions bescheduled as soon as possible to allow a steady flow rate throughApril 30.

Pacific Gas & Electric extended a low-inventory Stage 1 OFO(see Daily GPI, Sept. 1) through today. Penalties were unchanged,but the negative imbalance tolerance was tightened to 5%.