Transwestern will install equipment early next month along its San Juan Lateral from Ignacio, CO to the Blanco (NM) Hub and from Blanco to Thoreau, NM to ensure continued system reliability. The work will reduce lateral flow to zero in both segments April 3-7. Ignacio-Blanco will be restored to its normal 716,000 MMBtu/d on April 8, while Blanco-Thoreau will be raised to 800,000 MMBtu/d April 8-14 and restored to its normal 860,000 MMBtu/d April 15.

Northwest has posted several actions that it may take to deal with the April 3-7 outage of Transwestern’s San Juan Lateral (see above), which will prevent any Transwestern/Northwest receipts or deliveries at the La Plata interconnect. See the Northwest bulletin board for details. Northwest noted that under normal circumstances it is able to inject gas that can’t physically flow northbound through the Kemmerer Station into Questar’s Clay Basin storage facility. “However, during the Transwestern outage it is likely that parties that normally deliver gas to Transwestern will of necessity attempt to inject it into Clay Basin, resulting in allocation of injections by Questar. In this event Northwest’s injections could be limited to as little as [18 MMcf/d].” Customers “can help themselves and reduce the likelihood that Kemmerer is overscheduled by securing adequate gas from Canadian suppliers or by using their Jackson Prairie storage during this period,” Northwest said.

Noting long system imbalances this month, Sonat said Thursday that based on current gas prices and index averages, it is concerned that the level of long imbalances will increase “this weekend because of the economic conditions.” Shippers were asked to monitor nominations closely to avoid out-of-balance situations that would necessitate a Type 6 OFO with penalties of up to $15/Dth. The pipeline will post an OFO probability notice each day around 2 p.m. CCT starting Friday.

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