Bluestone line to expand, accept more Southwestern gas

BY BRENDAN GIBBONS
Times-Shamrock Writer

DTE Energy Co. will expand its Bluestone Gathering System in Susquehanna County, the company announced this week.

By mid-2016, the Detroit-based company will add 200 million cubic feet of capacity per day to the roughly 44-mile Bluestone line, which gathers gas mostly from Susquehanna County’s eastern half and delivers it to the interstate Tennessee Gas Pipeline and the Millennium Pipeline in New York.

DTE announced its expansion as an agreement with Houston-based Southwestern Energy Co., which operates 96 producing wells in Susquehanna County, according to state production data. It has 318 permitted wells in the county, according to MarcellusGas.org.

Besides Pennsylvania, Southwestern has operations in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Denver, Texas and New Brunswick, Canada.

Its production in the Marcellus grew 47 percent from a year ago and 200 percent since it entered the play, the company announced in its third quarter results in October.

As of Sept. 30, Southwestern shipped 840 million cubic feet of gas out of the Marcellus per day, Chief Operating Officer William Way told analysts, with plans to increase the daily rate to one billion by the end of the year and 1.6 billion in 2016.

“Our current drilling budget allows us to ramp our production to match this increased firm transportation capacity,” he said.

Its agreement with Bluestone appears to be part of this plan. “The agreement expands the relationship we already had with DTE in the area and provides expanded gathering system infrastructure for our Susquehanna County acreage,” Southwestern spokeswoman Susan Richardson said in an email statement.

Efforts to reach Bluestone spokesman Mike Armiak were not successful.