Plant

A one-day outage of the Sea Robin Processing Plant that had been set for today (see Daily GPI, March 12) was postponed until Thursday. The anticipated impact on Sea Robin Pipeline deliveries to Sabine and Columbia Gulf will remain in effect.

It took longer to accomplish than previously expected (see Daily GPI, Jan. 16), but Westcoast was able to restore processing capacity at its McMahon Gas Plant near Fort St. John, BC, to its normal 630 MMcf/d around mid-afternoon Wednesday. The capacity had been cut by about a third Tuesday due to excessive foaming of a monoethanol amine (MEA) treatment solution causing a shutdown of processing train #3.

Westcoast declared a force majeure Tuesday at its McMahon Gas Plant after “MEA [monoethanol amine] solution foaming increased dramatically” during Monday evening and Tuesday morning. The foaming reduced McMahon raw gas treatment capacity from 630 MMcf/d to 437 MMcf/d as of Tuesday afternoon. Westcoast said it was acid washing affected MEA contactors, and expected to have full processing capacity restored this morning.

The drastic moves announced during a conference call is part of the continuing fallout from Enron Corp.’s bankruptcy, a lack of investor confidence and the recession. In Enron’s wake, merchant energy companies have been especially hard hit, with their stock prices plummeting and bond ratings dropping. Moody’s Investors Service downgraded $4.9 billion of Mirant’s debt to junk late on Wednesday.

Total Opal Plant tailgate nominations to interconnecting pipelines (Northwest, Kern River and CIG) will be cut by 350,000-370,000 dekatherms today due to tie-in work being performed by the operator of the Jonah Field. In conjunction with the Jonah work, Williams Field Services has scheduled a tie-in to be completed by Thursday morning, but it is not expected to required any additional reductions in nominations.

Due to a change in schedule, Tennessee was unable to deliver gas for processing to the Yscloskey Plant in southeast Louisiana beginning Wednesday. Customers were required to reduce PTR nominations for Yscloskey to zero until further notice.

Ever-expanding San Jose, CA-based Calpine Corp., one of the nation’s fastest growing merchant power plant developers, Tuesday bought another 236 Bcf of natural gas reserves through two purchases–one in the San Juan Basin in New Mexico and the other in South Texas. This brings Calpine’s gas reserves to about 1.5 Tcf, with a goal of having 6.7 Tcf in the company’s portfolio by the end of 2005 to support an almost exclusively gas-fired fleet of plants totaling 70,000 MW of output.

Texas Eastern will require the shut-in of all production upstream of the Provident City Plant on its Wilcox System in the South Texas Zone starting Tuesday due to anomaly investigations and the subsequent pipe repair needed. The work is expected to be completed sometime Saturday in order for gas flow to resume Sunday.

Mirant Corp. reported last Wednesday that an explosion occurred at its 447 MW Lovett power station in Tompkins Cove, NY. The blast injured one employee and shut down the entire generating facility, according to spokeswoman Jamie Stephenson.