Senate Energy Committee compiles natural gas ideas

Pipeline & Gas Journal, March, 2005

Development of an energy bill is once again on Congress's front burner and natural gas groups started to turn up the flame at a conference on Jan. 24 at the Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee. There were six separate sessions on different natural gas topics, all of them addressed by a different group of industry representatives.

A couple of things seem clear at the start. There will be immense pressure for Congress to address production impediments in the Rocky Mountain area. However, interstate pipeline construction will be low down on the agenda, if it is there at all. Neither the Kern River Gas Transmission pipeline which started carrying gas westward in May 2003 (900 MMcf/d) nor the Cheyenne Plains Pipeline (560 MMcf/d) which started operating in an easterly direction in January, are anywhere near capacity. So transmission capacity is not an issue.

Larry Downes, chairman of the Natural Gas Council and the American Gas Association, and CEO of New Jersey Resources, told the Senate conference, "Large tracts of federal lands are restricted for resource activity. It is time to take a fresh look, to determine which limitations remain necessary to protecting our environmental values, and which do not."

Support for clearing away environmental restrictions in the West came from an authoritative, non-industry source: the Argonne National Laboratory, whose recent report was alluded to by some of the speakers at the Jan. 24 conference. The Argonne report estimated that 464 Tcf of recoverable gas was placed beyond producers' reach because poor handling of the regulations implementing the National Environmental Policy Act. Drilling permit delays cost another 311 Tcf.

Compared to those large numbers, the Argonne report said that just 23 Tcf of capacity is being lost because of the time it takes transmission companies to get approval from FERC and the requisite state and local agencies.