Southcentral's gas storage is two-thirds full with winter coming

Southcentral Alaska heats itself in winter partly out of the ground it filled in summer. Utilities pump gas into two underground storage fields when demand is low, then pull it back out when the cold arrives and Cook Inlet's producing wells cannot keep up with what furnaces are asking for.

Those fields are about 68 percent full. Roughly 16 billion cubic feet of space sits empty, out of a combined capacity near 50 billion.

The two are not filling at the same pace. Hilcorp's field was at 71.3 percent midweek. CINGSA, the storage company on the Kenai that serves Enstar and Chugach Electric, was at 58.9 percent Thursday.

CINGSA will also stop taking gas entirely from Sept. 14 to Sept. 21 for required semiannual maintenance, a week out of what is left of the injection season before winter withdrawals begin.

The context for all of it is a supply problem the region has been circling for years. Enstar has said it is roughly 3 billion cubic feet short for this winter. In August, Hilcorp senior vice president Luke Saugier told an audience the region is "getting dangerously close to not having enough gas to go around." Members of the Southcentral Mayors' Energy Coalition have pushed back, saying Hilcorp remains committed to meeting the contracts it has signed.

The state has three new storage applications under review. The House and Senate Resources committees take up a Cook Inlet gas update at 1 pm Thursday.