Pipeline Grand Design
The B.C. extension is coming soon. TransCanada senior vice-president Max Feldman testified that the request for the NEB to take over supervision of Nova grew out of talks with Alberta gas production firms developing new B.C. supplies. Negotiations, in the form of pipeline capacity auctions known as “open seasons,” were underway on potential Nova extensions into three B.C. drilling hot spots, added TransCanada vice-president Stephen Clark. “I would expect we would be filing an application for at least one [pipeline construction project] in the early part of 2009.”
Effects of the pipeline scheme include knitting northern B.C. and Alberta together into a giant gas common market or warehouse. B.C. production will be absorbed into a pipeline system-wide trading and pricing network known as Nova inventory transfer, or NIT for short.
In probably the last provincial decision on a major addition to the grid, the Alberta Utilities Commission has approved a cornerstone of the gas industry overhaul – a direct route to a growing market for B.C. gas. The mid-2008 ruling authorized TransCanada to build a $925-million link called the North Central Corridor. The project is a 300-kilometer pipeline from the B.C. border across Alberta to the Athabasca oil sands region.
The planned deliveries – 1.3 to 1.5 billion cubic feet per day at first, in jumbo pipe that can increase shipments by adding compressors later – are enough to satisfy forecast gas demand growth in the bitumen belt. The new corridor’s capacity also exceeds initial gas deliveries proposed for the stalled Mackenzie Valley pipeline megaproject.
The Northwest Territories enthusiastically supports TransCanada. The scheme blazes a new trail towards economical development of northern gas in affordable stages, the territorial government predicts in a submission to the NEB. “The extent of – and economic benefit from – natural gas development in the Northwest Territories will be dependent upon the adequacy and cost of using the transportation system.”
Viewed from Yellowknife, the Nova grid is a route across Alberta to Canadian and U.S. markets and a starting point for northern pipeline extensions that would not have to reach all the way to Inuvik like the Mackenzie project. Producers such as MGM Energy, Paramount Resources and Husky Energy have gas much farther south in the Northwest Territories.
The top of the current Nova network is only about 100 kilometers south of the territorial boundary with Alberta. TransCanada has made a construction application for an extension that would close the gap.
The government in Yellowknife has told the NEB it is “keenly aware of and vitally interested in the use that gas from north of the 60th parallel will one day make of the Alberta system.” The Western Canada Sedimentary Basin that the Nova grid is built to serve extends north of the political boundary. “Extension of the Alberta system into the Northwest Territories is one of the available means to expand the delivery system
for WCSB gas.”
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