Florida Gas Transmission has begun unscheduled maintenance on one of the two compressor units at its Transco St. Helena interconnect in South Louisiana, requiring a reduction of capacity at the point to 15,000 MMBtu/d starting Wednesday. Current estimates indicate that the unit will be down for seven to eight days, FGT said.

Completion of a pigging outage of Matagorda Offshore Pipeline System has been extended again (see Daily GPI, Nov. 24), this time “until further notice,” MOPS operator Northern Natural Gas said Monday. The project began Nov. 18 and originally was scheduled to end this past Sunday.

In order to resume flows disrupted by the recent Hastings Extraction Plant outage (see Daily GPI, Nov. 20), Dominion will bypass wet gas volumes around the West Virginia plant effective with the start of Monday’s gas day. Initial bypass flows will be 42,000 Dth/d, the pipeline said, adding, “We hope to increase this amount as consistent cold weather occurs.” In light of the HEP outage, operating conditions require Dominion to first bring on those compressor stations discharging production gas with the lowest Btu content. “As bypass volumes increase, successively higher Btu producing areas and related compressor stations will be returned to line.” To maximize flows, all pool operators will be allocated a portion of the 33,000 Dth/d of capacity moving to Equitrans at the Copley and West Union meters and a portion of the capacity bypassing Hastings. Those choosing not to move either their allocated share on Equitrans or their bypass share on Dominion must shut in their gas. Dominion also posted Wednesday a review of recent operational conditions that could prompt issuance of an OFO and actions that shippers can take to avoid such an order; see the bulletin board for details.

Noting that since Nov. 3 it has not accepted nominations for ISS (interruptible storage) injections, parks or make-up due the pipeline because of “historically high storage inventory levels,” Sonat said Sunday (Nov. 23) it was returning to its normal procedure of evaluating such nominations on each scheduling cycle, effective immediately and until further notice.

CIG has posted notice of 115,000 Dth/d of capacity that may become available from an expansion of its Sand Springs meter with Northwest. The new capacity will be from Greasewood and points on the Parachute Creek Lateral in the Piceance Basin to the interconnection of CIG’s Uinta Lateral and Northwest at Sand Springs. Provided there is sufficient interest in the service, CIG will make the capacity available on or about April 1, 2004. Requests for the capacity are due by 5 p.m. MST Dec. 5. See the bulletin board for details.

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