For several years now, the biggest hurdle to natural gas production growth in the Marcellus/Utica was takeaway constraints — there simply wasn’t enough capacity on gas pipelines out of Appalachia to support a significant bump-up in regional output. Things have been changing though. The Mountain Valley Pipeline and a slew of expansion projects along Transco are allowing increasing volumes of gas to move to and through Virginia and the Carolinas. The proposed Borealis Pipeline across Ohio would enable up to 2 Bcf/d to move down the Texas Gas Transmission system to the Gulf Coast. And, as we discuss in today’s RBN blog, Kinder Morgan is planning several major projects in the Deep South — including the 2.1-Bcf/d Mississippi Crossing and 1.3-Bcf/d South System Expansion 4 projects — to move more gas into Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina.
As we said in our Don’t Stop Believin’ blog series on the Marcellus/Utica, production in the world-class shale play soared through the 2010s as hundreds of new wells were drilled and completed and many Bcf/d of new takeaway capacity was built. However, the play’s output has been largely rangebound through the first half of the 2020s, hovering between 34 and 36 Bcf/d, largely due to takeaway constraints and the painfully slow pace of capacity additions.
More recently, a number of important projects have advanced to construction and operation — the 2-Bcf/d Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) from northern West Virginia to Transco Station 165 in south-central Virginia being a prime example. Just as important, Williams Cos. (Transco’s owner) has been undertaking a long list of projects that allow considerably more gas to flow south on Transco into North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama. Williams and others also have been planning and building pipelines to deliver gas from Transco to points east of the system.
Williams isn’t the only midstream “family” making a series of improvements to its long-haul pipeline systems to facilitate more gas deliveries out of the Marcellus/Utica. Boardwalk Pipeline Partners, owner of the Texas Gas Transmission (TGT) system, is seeking to advance its proposed Borealis Pipeline, a greenfield pipe that would run 180 miles from Clarington, OH, to the northeastern tip of the TGT system in Lebanon, OH. Borealis, along with enhancements to TGT itself, would allow up to 2 Bcf/d to flow south/southwest to the Gulf Coast. Boardwalk is also planning the 1.16-Bcf/d Kosci Junction Pipeline, which will run 110 miles south/southeast from a TGT leg near Kosciusko, MS — Kosci for short — to an interconnect with the company’s Gulf South system south of Meridian, MS.
Figure 1. Tennessee Gas and Southern Natural Gas Systems. Source: RBN
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