Florida Gas Transmission said Friday morning it had completed repairs of a pinhole leak on the 22-inch mainline downstream of Station 4 in Galveston County, TX (see Daily GPI, March 7). The pipeline resumes scheduling up to normal capacity through Station 4 for Friday’s gas day.

After lifting a lengthy System Overrun Limitation for all market-area zones at midweek, Northern Natural Gas implemented a new SOL Saturday that was limited to Zones D and E/F.

Citing “much colder weather” forecasted to arrive in its Midwest market area Sunday, NGPL issued an advisory posting saying that effective at 6 a.m. CST that day (near the end of Saturday’s gas day) and until further notice, shippers and point operators must limit hourly takes at all delivery points in the Market Delivery Zone. See the bulletin board for details.

Northwest said Friday it expects to “be forced to issue” Monday morning a notice of Declared Overrun Entitlement for all points north of the Kemmerer (WY) Compressor Station. Northwest also expects to require releasing shippers to recall capacity from replacement shippers as necessary “to reinstate releasing shippers’ pre-release ability to respond to a general operational flow order (OFO).” The notice of recall will request shippers to recall capacity by 7 a.m. MST Tuesday. OFOs could be issued as early as Tuesday for application to Wednesday flows, the pipeline said. As of Thursday Northwest had about 900,000 dekatherms in its Jackson Prairie storage account. Net north flow scheduled through Kemmerer has consistently exceeded 550,000 Dth/d recently, and for Friday’s gas day through the Timely Cycle, it hit an all-time high of 573,000 Dth/d, “which translates to only 3,000 [dekatherms] less than full contract demand,” Northwest said. “If this pattern continues, Northwest’s Jackson Prairie storage account will be less than 700,000 [dekatherms] by Monday.” As shippers have often been reminded, the 700,000-dekatherm account balance will trigger OFOs. “We regret that these actions may be necessary. As in the past, the only way Northwest and its customers can avoid these measures is for customers to collectively lower net scheduled volumes flowing north through Kemmerer to approximately 500,000 Dth, the volume Northwest is able to physically move north through the Kemmerer corridor with all compression, including the portable compression, running. Lesser reductions might conceivably delay implementation of these measures, but that is not assured.”

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