Pacific Gas & Electric not only extended a systemwide high-inventory OFO into at least its third day Saturday but also bumped it up from Stage 2 to Stage 3 and increased the penalties for exceeding a positive daily imbalance tolerance of 5% (unchanged) from $1/Dth to $5.

Southern California Gas lifted Saturday a high-linepack OFO that had been issued for Friday.

Tennessee notified all Interruptible Storage (IS) customers that it was interrupting IS service in Northern Storage because of high storage balances and the pipeline’s need to ensure operational flexibility and to serve higher priority customers. In accordance with Section 3.3 of Rate Schedule IS, Tennessee said it requires that 100% of any IS customer’s balance be withdrawn under an IS-MA agreement by Oct. 20. “Because of the amount of time available to complete withdrawals and the quantities of gas involved, customers, at this time, will not be required to withdraw gas at the minimum daily rates. Also, as stated in the same Section 3.3, such withdrawals cannot be satisfied by transferring the gas to another agreement unless such agreement is an FS contract,” Tennessee said.

Columbia Gulf said Friday it is not allowing any payback of imbalances or creation of positive imbalances until further notice. Shippers currently holding a positive imbalance must draw it down as soon as possible, the pipeline said, adding that it may issue customer-specific OFOs to those who fail to comply.

Florida Gas Transmission ended Friday an Overage Alert Day that had been in effect since last Monday. It also noted that due to current operating conditions, ongoing maintenance at the FGT/Transco St. Helena interconnect, which is resulting in zero volumes being scheduled at the South Louisiana interconnect, will continue until further notice. During normal operations FGT schedules up to 60,000 MMBtu/d there. It previously had expected the outage to last only Thursday and Friday (see Daily GPI, Sept. 20).

Northern Natural Gas reported successfully completing hydrostatic testing of its Redfield storage facility’s supply line (see Daily GPI, Sept. 5) and said the associated force majeure has been lifted. Though the Redfield work is complete, Interruptible Deferred Delivery injection capacity may still be affected depending on quantities nominated, the pipeline said.

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