The Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) and planned expansions to it and the Transcontinental Gas Pipe Line (Transco) system are providing utilities, data centers and others in Virginia and the Carolinas with enhanced access to Marcellus/Utica-sourced natural gas — and man, will they need it! Plans for new generating capacity between Washington, DC and the South Carolina/Georgia state line are proliferating, and the increasing ability to move large volumes of gas south on MVP and Transco will give producers in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio an important incremental outlet for their gas well into the 2030s. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll discuss the boom in power demand in Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina and the very timely expansion of gas-pipeline access to three states.
We’ve hit parts of this larger story from different angles — in this blog mini-series, we’ll tie it all together. We’ll begin with MVP, the 303-mile, 2-Bcf/d gas pipeline that for many years was a poster child for the challenges midstream companies face in developing big energy infrastructure projects. It ultimately took both an Act of Congress and a U.S. Supreme Court ruling for MVP’s development consortium — led by Equitrans Midstream (now part of Marcellus/Utica gas production giant EQT Corp.) — to clear its remaining regulatory and legal battles.
MVP (light blue line in Figure 1 below) is a 42-inch-diameter pipe that runs from the heart of the Marcellus/Utica region in northern West Virginia to an interconnection with Williams’s Transco system at Transco’s Compression Station 165 (aka Station 165) in Pittsylvania County, VA. Transco (green lines) is a roughly 10,000-mile interstate pipeline between southern Texas and the New York City area. MVP started commercial operation in mid-June, and in recent days it has been transporting well under 1 Bcf/d (according to RBN’s weekly NATGAS Appalachia report), or less than half its current capacity, mostly due to constraints north, south and east from Station 165. (MVP’s developers plan to expand the pipe’s capacity by 500 MMcf/d, to 2.5 Bcf/d, “as soon as possible” — more on that later.)
Figure 1. MVP, Transco and Other Selected Gas Pipelines. Source: RBN
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