The Williams Cos News

U.S. energy firms are scrambling to finish a slew of pipelines that will unleash rich reserves of shale gas in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio as the nation prepares to become one of the world’s top natural gas exporters. The pipelines are expected to boost output from shale fields in the three states by giving producers access to new domestic and international markets. Those states could supply about a third of all U.S. natural gas once the pipeline expansion is complete, up from about 25 percent now, according to projections from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).

Williams Cos Inc's Transcontinental Gas Pipeline Co (Transco) unit on Tuesday announced an open season to gauge interest in natural gas firm storage capacity at its Eminence Storage Field in Covington County, Mississippi. The open season, which runs from June 3 to July 16, is for storage service for up to 8.7 billion cubic feet per day of withdrawal and 7.3 billion cubic feet per day of injection as 7 well as a storage capacity of 73.1 billion cubic feet. The capacity will become available on Aug. 1, 2014. According to a website posting, the Eminence salt cavern storage facility has a current operating capacity of nearly 12 billion cubic feet.

U.S. utilities have withdrawn a record amount of natural gas from underground storage to meet heating and power needs during an extremely cold winter, but gas producers say they are confident they can rebuild inventory. "We believe North America has the capacity to supply far more natural gas than we are doing now at a reasonable price," said William Maloney, Statoil's executive vice president of development and production for North America, speaking at the IHS CERAWeek conference in Houston, an annual meeting of global energy leaders. Some traders have expressed doubts that inventories would be rebuilt in time for next winter, but Maloney said the biggest challenge is not supply, but demand.

The U.S. Coast Guard reopened the Houston Ship Channel on a limited basis Monday, after the primary transport route in and out of the city's large oil refining and petrochemical complex was partly shut by flooding during the weekend. The Coast Guard shut down the channel north of Baytown early Saturday, after floodwaters from Tropical Storm Allison caused more than a dozen barges to slip their moorings and block the bulkloading facility. The southern section of the channel was closed to all but emergency traffic during that time. The decision to reopen the channel came after Coast Guard safety crews checked the integrity of navigational markers and found they were still intact. Traffic is still limited, however. "It's going to be on a case-by-case basis.