(“Brookside”) has received permit approval from the Texas Railroad Commission on its application to develop, operate and maintain an underground hydrocarbon storage facility in the Bethel Salt Dome located in the northwest portion of Anderson County, Texas approximately 18 miles northwest of Palestine, Texas. The facility will have a natural gas working volume of 20 billion cubic feet with the ability to expand to 40 billion cubic feet by development of additional storage caverns.
The facility is ideally located with connections to several large pipelines serving the Barnett Shale and East Texas production areas, as well as power plants and residential and industrial customers in the East Texas market. Increasingly, there is a need for high deliverability storage in the marketplace. This need is punctuated by the ever increasing and more highly variable natural gas demand for residential, commercial, and power customers. The residential and commercial customers’ natural gas demand can increase by a factor of ten (10) from summer to winter. Meanwhile, the increasing use of natural gas for power generation creates substantial demand during peak load periods in summer. These weather sensitive customers require substantial amounts of gas during periods of extreme weather. The Brookside project in the Bethel Salt Dome is ideally suited to respond to these needs. The facility will inject gas during periods of low customer demand such as nights, weekends, and moderate weather periods. Customers can then withdraw during periods of high demand when there is a need to generate power in times of warm weather or the need to heat homes and businesses in times of cold weather. In this way, salt dome storage provides a valuable balancing service to shift natural gas availability from times of excess to times of shortage. |
