Midship project sailing on

Cheniere Energy Inc. which plans a $1 billion Midship Pipeline, got started on the project last week when county commissioners approved permits for 27 road crossings in the county.

Cheniere has obtained approval for the project from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

The 200-mile-long pipeline will start in Kingfisher County and head south and east to southeastern Bryan County on the Oklahoma-Texas line, where it will hook into the nation’s interstate pipeline system.

Once it becomes operational in the third quarter of 2019, it will have the capacity to carry 1.44 million dekatherms (about 1.44 billion cubic feet) of natural gas per day out of Oklahoma’s SCOOP and STACK fields.

The STACK and SCOOP fields are part of the Cana Woodford Basin, which is the third most active oil and natural gas field in the country, according to Baker Hughes.

While it may take processing capacity in those fields a bit to catch up, a Cheniere spokesman said the supply the line will carry will boost the availability of natural gas for the nation.

The pipeline also will provide a ready source of product that ultimately can be exported from the U.S. via liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals.

Cheniere’s main business is LNG exports with one established terminal in southwestern Louisiana, and another near operational in Corpus Christi, Texas.

“This will get natural gas into the U.S. pipeline system for other power and industrial demand sources and to our LNG export platforms,” Eben Burnham-Snyder, Cheniere’s communications vice president, said.

Tony Say, a natural gas analyst and president of Oklahoma City-based Clearwater Enterprises, is interested in how Midship will impact STACK and SCOOP producers, as they’ve been selling natural gas at a discount to midstream firms that gather and process the product in those areas, according to an online state newspaper article.