Transportation

A 270 MMcf/d reduction in San Juan Basin supply persisted intothe weekend-and possibly beyond-as El Paso reported it had founddamage to internal rotating components in its Blanco Plant’s “D”turbine that would require removal and inspection. The plant hadbeen scheduled to resume full operation Thursday. If the parts canbe repaired and reused, the turbine should return to service May31, El Paso said. But if the parts must be replaced, the projectedreturn date is June 5.

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.

Questar rescheduled last Tuesday’s planned ball launching toThursday, June 3. Major allocations are expected.

PG&E Gas Transmission-Northwest now expects Unit 5-C toreturn to service for June 1 operations, raising Kingsgate capacityto 2,360 MMcf/d. The return of Unit 7-C is scheduled for June 10,with Kingsgate reaching 2,520 MMcf/d.

A direct lightning strike occurred Monday at Transwestern’sBisti Compressor Station (San Juan County, NM), prompting thepipeline to declare a force majeure. Transwestern expected thestation to be down about three days, saying San Juan Lateralcapacity would be reduced to 700,000 MMbtu/d through Thursday.

Citing continuing compressor repairs at Station 13, Northern BorderFriday extended a reduction of system throughput to 90% of summerdesign capacity (see Daily GPI, May 19)through Saturday and Sunday.

About 1 Bcf/d of NOVA capacity will be cut from May 31 to June9 as part of the system is inspected for stress corrosion crackingwhile tie-ins and other maintenance are performed. NOVA will take100 miles of 36-inch line between the Miekle River and Knightcompressor stations in northwest Alberta out of service during thattime. NOVA normally moves a total of about 11.8 Bcf/d, a spokesmansaid.

NOVA estimated that repairs to a flange assembly leak on its NorthLateral (see Daily GPI, May 17), whichstarted Wednesday, would take 24-36 hours to complete. Some receiptsupstream of Dusty Lake Compressor Station are being curtailed by thework.

Trunkline postponed a three-day outage of Valve Section 32between the Cypress and Kountze Stations in East Texas until June.It will require shutting in all receipts upstream of the sectionunless they entail equal deliveries upstream.