Intends

Columbia Gas Transmission Corp. intends to expand its Ohio storage facilities by 6.7 Bcf of working capacity and enhance daily deliverability from its Weaver and Crawford storage fields by 100 MMcf/d under its Ohio Storage Expansion project, for which it filed with the FERC on Tuesday.

NGS Energy LP said it intends to raise $310 million in senior secured credit facilities to fund remaining construction and pad gas purchases at Tres Palacios Gas Storage LLC, a new underground salt cavern gas storage facility under construction in Matagorda and Wharton counties, TX. Tres Palacios will have three caverns and will be a high-deliverability, multi-cycle facility with several interconnections and significant storage capacity. Credit Suisse has been retained to raise the financing. The project — which received Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approval in September 2007 (see Daily GPI, Sept. 21, 2007) — would be designed to allow cycling up to seven times a year, with a peak injection rate of 1 Bcf/d and a maximum withdrawal capability of 2.5 Bcf/d. Tres Palacios also plans to construct approximately 42 miles of pipeline that would extend from the facility to interconnections with 12 intrastate and interstate pipelines. The FERC order requires the storage and pipeline facilities to be built and in service within one year. Tres Palacios would be situated among several proposed or existing liquefied natural gas (LNG) import terminals, including Calhoun LNG and Freeport LNG. The project includes a header system that crosses more than 8 Bcf/d of downstream pipeline capacity. Headquartered in Westport, CT, NGS Energy was founded in 2006 to develop a portfolio of high-deliverability storage assets.

Energy Transfer Partners LP intends to build the Texas Independence Pipeline, a $485 million, 42-inch diameter intrastate gas pipeline to serve the booming Bossier and Barnett Shale resource plays of East Texas and north central Texas, the company said last week.

Sempra Energy’s Southern California Gas Co. (SoCalGas) unit intends to employ its new 45.5-mile pipeline in the high desert northeast of the Los Angeles Basin to meet the growing energy demand from the expanding town of Twenty-Nine Palms, CA, and its nearby U.S. Marine Training Base. SoCalGas will not integrate the pipeline into its larger backbone transmission pipeline system, a spokesperson told NGI.

Sempra Energy’s Southern California Gas Co. (SoCalGas) unit intends to employ its new 45.5-mile pipeline in the high desert northeast of the Los Angeles Basin to meet the growing energy demand from the expanding town of Twenty-Nine Palms, CA, and its nearby U.S. Marine Training Base. SoCalGas will not integrate the pipeline into its larger backbone transmission pipeline system, a spokesperson told NGI.

St. Mary Land & Exploration Co. said it intends to sell a package of noncore oil and gas properties, located primarily in the Rockies and Midcontinent regions. A preliminary estimate indicates that the package represents approximately 74 Bcfe of proved oil and gas reserves, the company said. The sales price of the properties will be determined by a competitive bidding process. Denver-based St. Mary Land & Exploration will complete the divestiture in late December if it receives what it believes is an appropriate offer. The company also announced that it repurchased a total of about 791,000 shares of outstanding common stock in the open market at a weighted average cost of $32.82 a share.

Apache Corp. intends to spend its free cash flow on exploration rather than what’s now used by many of its peers: share buybacks.

Apache Corp. intends to spend its free cash flow on exploration rather than what’s now used by many of its peers: share buybacks.

The New York Mercantile Exchange’s (Nymex) announcement late Wednesday that it intends to enter the soft agricultural commodity futures markets ruffled more than a few feathers in the trading world, chiefly those of the New York Board of Trade (Nybot), which accused Nymex on Thursday of a “transparent attempt to interfere” with Nybot’s $1 billion-plus merger with IntercontinentalExchange (ICE).