Repair

Entergy Corp. is estimating total restoration costs for the repair or replacement of its electric facilities damaged by Hurricane Rita will be in the range of $400-550 million, while Cleco Corp. last week estimated that Rita will cost the company approximately $50 million.

Gulf of Mexico producers and drilling contractors, many still struggling to restore production and repair platforms and rigs in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, were moving quickly Monday to get their personnel out of the path of oncoming Tropical Storm Rita, which the National Hurricane Center (NHC) believes could be a major hurricane later this week with a current trajectory over the Central Gulf.

Transwestern will reduce WT-2 Station capacity by 120,000 MMBtu/d Thursday due to unplanned maintenance involving repair of a cooling tube. Ten points will be affected by the cut. WT-2 will return to normal capacity of 600,000 MMBut/d Friday.

Florida Gas Transmission kept an Overage Alert Day notice, issued Friday, in place through Saturday before ending it Sunday.

Repair of the second rupture on TransCanada Pipeline Ltd.’s Nova system is progressing and the company said it expects that the section will be ready “sometime Thursday” for commercial operation, barring any unforeseen delays.

While repairing an equipment failure at the Castle Valley CO2 Plant, Questar decided to inspect and repair additional equipment as a preventative measure. To facilitate the work, a plant outage originally scheduled for Feb. 11-12 will be extended through Feb. 13-14. The plant is expected to return to service at a reduced processing level of about 70,000 Dth/d for the Feb. 15 gas day. Because no processing will be available during the Feb. 11-14 period, Questar will work closely with upstream producers to maintain gas quality within tariff specifications. Equipment removed during the shutdown is scheduled for reinstallation during the last week of February, after which the plant is expected to return to normal service. No plant shutdown is required and no customer impact is expected during this installation, Questar said.

The natural gas market is broken, and an Enron-Dynegy merger certainly would exacerbate the problem, Apache Corp. said on Thursday. The large independent producer believes gas prices are out of control with companies, such as Dynegy and Enron, working to increase price volatility, which undermines the drilling plans and budgets of production companies. Apache believes the federal government needs to step in and reimpose price controls on the market or require all gas futures trades be backed up by physical gas.

In order to repair a mainline fitting at the Stanfield (OR) CityTap, PG&E Gas Transmission-Northwest (GTN) will isolate itsA-Line between Main Line Valves 8-2.5 and 8-3.0 for about 16 hoursThursday. Capacity at points downstream of MLV 8-3.0 will bereduced about 70 MMcf/d to 2,000 MMcf/d. Based on current flowconditions, GTN estimated Station 14 immediately upstream fromMalin will experience a capacity cut from 1,940 MMcf/d to 1,875MMcf/d. Every effort will be made to return the system to fullcapacity by Friday’s gas day, GTN said.

Transwestern declared force majeure at the Bloomfield (NM)Compressor Station after the #4 unit went down over the weekend.Repair downtime is uncertain pending the availability of parts, thepipeline said, but it hoped to have the unit back in serviceFriday. The outage reduces normal San Juan Lateral capacity of850,000 MMBtu/d to about 580,000 MMBtu/d today and about 800,000MMBtu/d Thursday.