Cook Inlet gas storage at 69.5% as winter nears, with one field shut in for maintenance

Southcentral Alaska's two commercial gas storage fields kept taking gas in and sending none out as of Monday, Sept. 21. A new weekly chart from Alaskans for Sustainable Budgets puts the two at a combined 69.5 percent full, with gas flowing in at 22.7 percent of what the fields can absorb and nothing flowing out.

Enstar's CINGSA field on the Kenai stood at 59.4 percent, taking gas at 12.3 percent of capacity. Hilcorp's HAGS field stood at 73.0 percent, taking it at 44.6 percent.

The group said it started the weekly chart out of concern about winter service in Southcentral. It draws on the public dashboards each operator maintains and the most recent aggregate dashboard from the state Department of Natural Resources.

CINGSA's dashboard shows the field was shut in from Sept. 14 to Sept. 21 for its semiannual balancing and maintenance, taking no gas during that stretch. Its posted inventory matches the 59.4 percent figure.

Storage matters here because Cook Inlet production no longer covers the coldest days. Enstar expects to be 3 billion cubic feet short this winter, and producers told a joint legislative committee the inlet cannot cover regional demand past 2029. An earlier reading put the two fields at about 68 percent full, with roughly 16 billion cubic feet of room empty.

Last winter showed what that looks like in practice. Enstar president John Sims told legislators in August that nearly 1.5 billion cubic feet came out of storage "in the month of December alone," and almost as much again in March.

CINGSA, Alaska's first commercial underground gas storage facility, holds 13 billion cubic feet. State regulators are still reviewing three applications to build more Cook Inlet storage, two from Hilcorp and one from Enstar.