NY’s Millennium Pipeline Launches Open Season to Expand
The Millennium Pipeline–a natural gas pipeline running through upstate New York’s Southern Tier area from Corning, NY to Rockland County, NY–announced a new open season yesterday. The open season will sign up new customers from now until the end of the month, March 31. The Millennium, which is jointly owned by NiSource, National Grid and DTE Energy, plans to expand facilities along the line, increasing capacity. That usually means they will install some new loops, or additional pipelines right next to the existing pipeline, along with upgrades to compressor plants. The purpose? Deliver more clean-burning natural gas to customers throughout the northeast…
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By most measures, Dominion Transmission’s New Market Project is a fairly dull $159 million capacity upgrade to an existing natural gas pipeline which runs across upstate New York from the PA line, west of Horseheads, northeasterly to the state’s Capital Region (see the map below). We are now about a month away from the originally forecast April 2015 date when Dominion thought it might get a green light from FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (Docket Number CP14-497). September 2015 was originally forecast for beginning construction (280 jobs, all temporary, as are all construction jobs), while November 2016 was the target in-service date (adding 10 to 12 permanent jobs, running forward)…
New applications filed Feb. 20 and 27 with the New York State Public Service Commission show that built-up areas of Windsor, NY (Broome County) are in line to be the first in a sequence of small town conversions to natural gas previously announced by Leatherstocking Gas Company, LLC. Assuming the Windsor application doesn’t hit any hitches with the state, Leatherstocking’s target date for installation is Fall 2015, according to Town Supervisor Carolyn Price. “It’s one of the most frequently asked questions I get,” Price told MDN Monday morning. “When am I going to get natural gas?” Price also said a number of Windsor residents, while they wait, have needed to replace furnaces, and they’ve been installing propane-fueled burners–because those are reported to be more easily switched over to natural gas, down the road…
New York’s anti-drillers are still not happy–even after winning a ban by pressuring a spineless governor. They continue to rally and agitate and spread lies and threats and tell scary stories of environmental boogeymen…”that pipeline’ll kill ya”…”the fracked gas comin’ out the stove has radon in it”…”the compressor station three miles from your house that you didn’t even know existed is poisonin’ Mother Earth.” Why do they persist long after they’ve won? Are they empty in the soul and only find meaning in these silly pursuits and endless meetings? Do they have otherwise meaningless lives? Is there a permanent cloud over their heads no matter the circumstance? Who knows. Here’s the latest “fracking will still kill New Yorkers–even though there is no fracking in New York” event this Thursday, starring the so-called “distinguished scholar in residence” at Ithaca College, Sandra Steingraber…
There is an effort underway–a serious effort–for towns along the border in some upstate New York counties to secede from New York State and join Pennsylvania. Why? Because of New York’s ban on hydraulic fracturing. And no, this is not an early April Fool’s joke. MDN first started hearing of secession talk shortly after Gov. Cuomo’s disgraceful cabinet meeting in which he let bootlickers Howard Zucker (State Health Commissioner) and Joe Martens (DEC Commissioner) take the fall for a ban on fracking–a ban Cuomo himself wanted. We saw some signs and heard a few mentions of secession and chalked it up to understandably high emotions over Cuomo stealing away their future. But it seems it’s not just so much hot air. A group called the Upstate New York Towns Association has done some polling and found 15 towns along the border area of NY are ready to make the leap. There are, however, some major hurdles in the way…
MDN has the low-down on proposed new federal legislation we first told you about yesterday, the Defense of Property Rights Act (see