OLEAN, N.Y. – With the arrival of cold weather, millions of
natural gas customers will adjust their thermostats upward to heat
their homes without any thought to all the work and processes
involved to bring this clean, reliable and efficient fuel to them
from as far away as the Gulf of Mexico.

These and other questions were answered Thursday when officials
and other employees of Dominion Transmission hosted an open house
at the Quinlan compressor station and storage facility in
Cattaraugus County. The site of this underground natural gas
storage project is located off Route 16, 5.6 miles south of Olean
and .6 mile off Ho-Sta-Geh Road. According to Dominion officials,
this project was needed to satisfy the growing natural gas storage
needs in the eastern United States.

According to Dominion, this project was necessary to satisfy the
growing demand for natural gas storage needs in the eastern United
States. Dominion Transmission, owns and maintains about 10,000
miles of pipeline in Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York,
Maryland and Virginia.

Company personnel explained the gas cleaning and dehydration
equipment, regulating facilities, control equipment, vapor recovery
systems and control; and safety features at the plant, which was
put in operation in April.

Twenty miles of 20-inch pipe carry natural gas from Sharon
Township in Potter County to the Quinlan plant where it is measured
for billing purposes before being sold to customers, including
National Fuel. At Quinlan, the gas is stored in old wells that are
not producing any more, said Tim Freeman, operations supervisor,
Stateline Station. While all of the wells in this storage project,
reaching depths of 4,000-5,000 feet, are located in New York, a
storage field buffer area reaches into McKean County.

Thursday’s late morning program opened with Dominion officials
giving an overview of the project.

Dan Weekley, director of Northeast government affairs, said,
“This was a great project not only for us, but for both New York
and Pennsylvania.”

With this project was built about one mile from the New
York-Pennsylvania border, Dominion initially considered sites in
both states. Due to the role played by Norm Leyh of the Cattaraugus
Industrial Development Authority, who said, “Western New York is
open for business.”

Dominion applied for and received a tax abatement for
infrastructure development, Weekley said.

But Pennsylvania wasn’t shut out of the project completely since
it still received about $200 million share of the overall expansion
project.

In his comments, Kevin Zink, director of Northeastern
operations, said that this storage field project has a total
capacity of 8 billion cubic feet of natural gas with 4 billion
cubic feet of working gas.

The remainder, said Robert Fulton, manager of media and
community relations, maintains the integrity of the gas pool and
can reduce pump pressure.

The Quinlan station is manned around the clock and is also
monitored at Dominion’s gas control center in Clarksburg, West
Virginia.

Weekley described the nation’s natural gas pipeline system as “a
superhighway with lots of on and off ramps. Most of the gas used in
the Northeast comes from the Gulf of Mexico.”

Both Weekley and Fulton noted that Dominion Transmission is a
storage company that owns natural gas pools solely or in
partnerships and sells the gas to many companies who in turn sell
to residences, factories and businesses. Customers buy blocks of
natural gas during warm weather when the costs are low and Dominion
stores it for a fee until it’s withdrawn in the winter and prices
are higher.

At the time the gas is withdrawn, it is taken from the storage
field, compressed, heated if needed, cleansed of any impurities
acquired during storage, and distributed to customers in the
Northeast, according to Dominion.

Zink said this storage field is capable of supporting daily
withdrawals of 200 million cubic feet. As a comparison, Zink said,
“Consider that the average home uses 150,000 cubic feet
annually.”

In answer to a man’s question avoiding the recent pipeline
shutdown in Alaska due to corrosion, Zink reviewed some of the
safeguards, many of which are company policy and others are
mandated by regulatory agencies such as the New York Department of
Environmental Conservation, and the Department of Transportation
and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

“This is a very safe facility. The pipe is hydrostatically
tested, and the pipelines are inspected on a regular basis,” he
said. “We fly over the pipelines once a month, and our guys walk
the pipelines four times a year. Periodic checks are also made for
corrosion which works from the pipe’s exterior to interior because
there is no oxygen inside the pipe.”

“Smart pigs” are used to clean the pipe’s interior. So named due
to the high pitched noise they make, these machines which are the
diameter of the pipe about the length of a pickup truck and
equipped with magnets and electronics, are pushed by pressure
through the pipes. At the end of the course, which is usually 30-40
miles, but be as high as 60-70 miles, the unit is removed from the
pipe and a readout on the pipe’s condition is readily available

“This is a very safe facility with state-of-the-art equipment,”
Zink said. “It is one of our flagships.”