Interesting Thanks, a quick read on Dominion's website was very informative.
It says the line is Bi- directial, do you know if the new turbines have NG storage tanks?
Being Bi- directial makes me wonder if NG is cheaper to import they will reverse the flow. idk
Most NG is stored either in the high-pressure pipelines themselves or in underground rock formations that can hold gas (e.g. depleted oil fields). I don't believe that either of the new plants will keep significant amounts of gas on site.
The Cove Point terminal was built in the 70s when gas prices were high and supply in the US was constrained. The original plan was for liquified natural gas to be imported from cheerful places like Algeria, gasified at Cove Point and fed into the east coast pipeline system. The original operator of Cove Point built the thing along with a pipeline to move the gas to market. I believe they unloaded one or two ships before gas prices in the US collapsed and it stopped to make sense to import LNG to the mid-atlantic (there has been some LNG import to supply the Boston area).
In recent years, through the magic of hydraulic fracturing and directional drilling, the US has markedly increased its domestic production of natural gas. This has caused a number of different things:
- it is now cheaper to burn NG than coal
- we have a glut of NG, prices are low and it now starts to make sense to export gas.
As a result, Dominion is in the process of building a big compressor plant at the Cove Point terminal which reverses the LNG process. Rather than importing LNG from ships at the pier, they take gaseous natural gas and compress/cool it for liquefaction (using some of the gas in the process). As part of that project, the pipeline that was originally designed to carry gas from Cove Point to its interconnect with the rest of the Dominion system, has been upgraded to carry gas from the Dominion pipelines down to Covepoint. I don't know whether the new Cove Point facility would be equipped to import gas if need be.