Vermont Gas plans to use a “virtual pipeline” to provide immediate service to three commercial customers in Middlebury while work continues on the company’s 41-mile pipeline extension through Addison County.
The natural gas utility announced Wednesday it will build an off-loading station that will feed a pipeline network to serve Agri-Mark, Vermont Hard Cider and Middlebury College. Gas would be transported to the station by truck. The “gas island” could be operational as soon as late October.
Construction is underway for a pipeline extension from Chittenden County south to Middlebury. State regulators approved the project in December, but it has received pushback from environmental groups and landowners.
Steve Wark, Vermont Gas’ spokesman, said the “gas island” will save the commercial customers about 20 percent on their heating bill compared to the cost of propane or oil. But the pipeline is still needed, he said, because it would provide savings of between 40 percent and 52 percent.
Wark also said that the pipeline is needed for residential customers, because serving them with compressed natural gas is not feasible. He said about 88 percent of the company’s 50,000 current customers in Chittenden and Franklin counties are residential, and estimates are about the same percentage for the 4,000 customers that would be served by the pipeline extension.
The company partnered with NG Advantage, of Milton, to ship the compressed natural gas by truck. NG Advantage, which was founded in 2011 and has been transporting gas for 18 months, currently supplies customers in Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and eastern New York.
NG Advantage only serves customers who buy more than $750,000 a year in gas and are located within 200 miles of a company compressor station. Its clients include hospitals, asphalt plants, paper mills and other commercial companies.
Mary Evslin, vice president of marketing for NG Advantage, said Vermont Gas is the first natural gas company in the nation to work with a transporter like NG Advantage to distribute gas.
She said the natural gas is compressed from 500 pounds per square inch (PSI) to 4,000 PSI, cooled, and placed into four 40-foot long carbon fiber tanks within the trucks. The trailers holding these tanks cost about $500,000 each, she said.
Wark said the off-loading station will be located on Exchange Street in Middlebury, which is to the north of the the city center. He said the facility itself will be small and the distribution lines will be trenched underground.
When the pipeline is completed, Evslin said, NG Advantage would remove the off-loading station, which can be picked up and placed at another location.
Sandy Levine a senior attorney with the Conservation Law Foundation, which opposes the pipeline for environmental reasons, said Vermont Gas did not account for the cost of transporting compressed natural gas in its state permit.
“This is an added use that will result in greater greenhouse gas emission that should have been part of the Phase One evaluation,” she said.
The Vermont Public Service Board will decide whether to re-evaluate the project in light of cost increases announced this summer after Vermont Gas received a state permit. Next week, state regulators will hold a public hearing to determine whether the company violated state law by notify them about cost increases in July when they had the estimates prepared in March. Vermont Gas has said they waited to notify regulators about the new costs until they received their federal wetlands permit.
Vermont Gas is also seeking regulatory approval to build a pipeline from Middlebury to a paper mill in Ticonderoga, New York, and it has begun planning for a pipeline that would bring gas to Rutland.
