From The Recorder (Greenfield, Maine)
The U.S. Energy Information Agency has predicted that the country will become a net exporter of LNG in 2018, the same year Tennessee Gas Pipeline Co.’s proposed 412-mile NED pipeline would, if approved, begin operation, crossing eight Franklin County towns on its route from Pennsylvania shale fields to Dracut, north of Lowell.
Dracut is also the hub for a host of pipelines, including Spectra Energy’s Algonquin Gas transmission line carrying gas from the Texas Eastern line in Pennsylvania in the south, and the Maritimes and Northeast line running through New Hampshire, Maine and New Brunswick to Point Tupper in northern Nova Scotia.
The Maritimes and Northeast pipeline, with more than 75 percent ownership by Spectra, is planned to have its flow reversed, in the wake of declining imports of foreign LNG with gasification flow to U.S. markets and the growing potential for Marcellus shale gas to be exported abroad.
The M & N pipeline, built in 1999 to carry 800 million cubic feet of gas a day from drilling rigs off the Nova Scotia coast through Maine into southern New England, has been carrying less than half of that in recent years.
