Southern California Gas waited until early Wednesday to declare a high-linepack OFO on the Intraday 1 nominations cycle for Wednesday’s gas day. The OFO was kept in place through at least Thursday. Buy-Back charges in accordance with SoCalGas rules and tariffs will be assessed to customers who deliver more than 110% of their actual gas usage into the distributor’s system on the OFO day.

Pacific Gas & Electric kept a systemwide Stage 3 high-inventory OFO that was implemented Wednesday on its California Gas Transmission system in effect through at least Thursday, but loosened the tolerance on positive daily imbalances from 3% to 5%.

Questar issued an OFO Tuesday to Interruptible Storage Service (ISS) customers of its Clay Basin facility. The OFO requires that all ISS customers who had a negative inventory balance as of Oct. 31 resulting from month-end allocation of storage fuels must transfer gas in place to bring the inventory to zero by the end of business on Nov. 30, Questar said.

Las Vegas-based LDC Southwest Gas declared a “hold to burn notice” Tuesday due to high linepack on pipelines upstream of its system. Customers were asked to ensure that “actual takes meet or exceed scheduled supply, assisting to reduce linepack to an acceptable level.” Southwest also said it has eliminated nominations for imbalance paybacks from customers to itself until further notice, adding, “If current conditions persist an OFO may be invoked at a stage determined at the time of declaration if/when it becomes necessary.”

In a Winter Operations Update Tuesday afternoon, Northwest asked shippers to voluntarily reduce their northbound nominations through Kemmerer (WY) Compressor Station to less than 660,000 Dth/d in order to avoid potential OFOs. For the gas days of Tuesday and Wednesday, scheduled northbound volumes through Kemmerer were 695,000 Dth/d and 692,000 Dth/d, respectively, the pipeline said. Northwest noted that it had previously communicated to shippers it will offset an OFO by moving balancing gas from Jackson Prairie to Clay Basin until its storage balance north of Kemmerer drops below 1.2 Bcf. “Based on the current throughput demand north through Kemmerer, Northwest will only be able to delay issuing OFOs for approximately” eight to 11 days, it said Tuesday. “…Northwest understands customers face a dilemma of either preserving the north-end balancing gas for peak winter days or taking advantage of current price spreads. While the north-end system storage balance is above 1.2 Bcf and the Kemmerer timely throughput nominations are above 660,000 Dth/d, Northwest will adhere to the following business practice during the winter heating season: Northwest will notify shippers of their potential OFO realignment volumes if those volumes exceed 1,000 Dth. Shippers can then adjust their nominations accordingly to help preserve the north-end storage balance.”

El Paso said it now expects to complete repairs to the #2A unit at Alamo Lake Compressor Station by Thursday and to return the unit to service Friday. Late last week its timeline for finishing the work had been a day earlier in each case (see Daily GPI, Nov. 12).

NGPL reported completing its inspection of a leak-impacted section of Gulf Coast Mainline #3 in Jackson County, IL, between Compressor Stations 309 and 310 (see Daily GPI, Nov. 14) and has begun repairing the leak. It anticipates that the section will be back in service sometime Friday and said that if repairs are completed on time, Natural may allow intraday increases for Friday’s gas day depending on the level of nominations.

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