Crews continue to lay and weld pipe in Denton County this month, finishing a 3-foot diameter, 178-mile intrastate pipe­line known as the Sherman Extension.

This major natural gas transmission pipeline runs from Morgan Mill, in Erath County, north through Denton County to Sherman, in Grayson County, where it will connect to a new interstate pipeline, the 357-mile Gulf Crossing Pipeline.

DRC/Al Key

Gas pipe is laid Friday between Sanger and Denton for a project called the Sherman Extension, which will link to a major new interstate pipeline to deliver natural gas.

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Construction is on schedule for the Sherman Extension and it should be operational by the end of the year, according to Rick Rainey, spokesman for Hous­ton-based Enterprise Product Partners. The extension will help carry about 1.1 billion cubic feet of natural gas each day from the Barnett Shale.

Increasing production and demand, particularly from the Northeast, for natural gas to generate electric power is driving investment in additional pipe­lines, Rainey said.

“Traditionally, there had not been sufficient takeaway capacity to get the gas to the most attractive markets,” Rainey said. “The bottom line is that producers are seeing quite a large increase in the volumes that they are producing and they need to move it out of the region.”

The Sherman Extension will allow some volume to be taken off Enterprise’s intrastate lines in West Texas as well, Rainey said, allowing more capacity for those producers, too.

The Gulf Crossing Pipeline, a subsidiary of Boardwalk Pipe­line Partners, begins in Sher­man and ends near Tallulah, La. This 42-inch-wide, interstate pipeline will be operational in early 2009, able to move 1.7 billion cubic feet of gas per day, with additional compression capacity by 2010, according to the company’s news releases. The Gulf Crossing Pipeline will help move natural gas mined from the Barnett Shale, as well as the Caney and Woodford shales in Oklahoma, to consumers on the East Coast and the upper Midwest.

A July 2008 report by the Energy Information Admin­is­tration found that 40 percent of the 50 pipeline projects completed in 2007 — the busiest year in a decade for building pipelines — came alongside new production of natural gas in Colorado, Wyoming and Texas, particularly the Barnett Shale. Texas added about 700 of the 1,700 new miles on the nation’s pipeline network last year. According to the report, several market factors are driving investment in new pipe­lines, including increased de­mand for natural gas by the electric power sector.

Because production in the Barnett Shale could reach 6 billion cubic feet per day, En­ter­prise officials have already indicated that they may expand their capacity from the region soon. Last month, they an­nounced a 40-mile spur for the extension, running from Ar­ling­ton to Justin. The spur will open in 2009 and be able to move 1 billion cubic feet of gas per day, Rainey said. 

Nationwide, energy companies have proposed to federal regulators more than 10,100 miles of new pipeline projects between now and 2010. Not all projects are likely to be approved, as some target similar markets. But a substantial increase is expected in the Rocky Mountains and North­east Texas because of the maturing development of the Unita and Piceance basins in Colorado, the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and the Barnett Shale and Bossier formations in North Texas.

PEGGY HEINKEL-WOLFE can be reached at 940-566-6881. Her e-mail address is pheinkel-wolfe@dentonrc.com .