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PGE to Use NW Natural's Mist Gas Storage Facility

Posted on: Thursday, 21 July 2005, 21:01 CDT

NW Natural Gas Co. and Portland General Electric have entered into a 10-year agreement under which PGE will be allowed to store up to 1.26 million dekatherms of natural gas in NW Natural's Mist gas storage facility in Clatskanie.

A dekatherm is a measure of the heat content value of gas and is equivalent to 1 million Btu. A Btu is the energy required to raise the temperature of water one degree.

The gas storage will be used to augment gas pipeline service to PGE's existing Beaver Generating Plant near Clatskanie and the neighboring PGE Port Westward Generating Plant, which is under construction and slated to be online in May 2007.

Although the monetary terms of the agreement were not disclosed, Scott Simms, spokesman for PGE, said they are definitely good for our customers. Having gas storage will let us take advantage in dips in energy supply and augment the total cost of energy.

The Mist gas storage facility is an area of depleted natural gas reservoirs that NW Natural developed for underground gas storage in the 1980s. Originally opened in 1988, Mist has since expanded to serve an increasing customer base and now has the total storage capacity of 14 million dekatherms, with 5 million dekatherms of that capacity being made available to PGE and other agreement partners.

NW Natural plans to expand Mist to serve the new PGE service agreement and any other growth in retail or interstate customer needs.

Mist storage has been a low-cost resource for NW Natural customers for many years, so it only makes sense to develop further capacity to serve PGE's power plants and thereby benefit PGE customers as well, said Dennis Henderson, NW Natural's director of business development.

Source: Daily Journal of Commerce (Portland, OR)

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