OREANDA-NEWS. February 08, 2017.  The volume of idle capacity released by firm shippers and subsequently bought by third parties on US interstate natural gas pipelines fell last week.

Purchases by third parties of released capacity rights averaged at 454mn cf/d (13mn m?/d) on the top 10 interstate pipelines during the week ended 4 February, according to the Weekly Top 10 list published by CapacityCenter.com.

The list ranks US interstate pipelines by annualized equivalent capacity (AEC) volumes released each week.

The volume last week fell from the 856mn cf/d average released in the prior week, but was higher than the 218mn cf/d traded four weeks earlier.

Market participants often buy capacity in connection with their commodity trading in the month-ahead market, meaning that capacity release activity can take a monthly cyclical trend.

The total number of deals decreased to 225 from 2,124 in the previous week.

The majority of deals — 182 — were spot deals, and 36 were medium-term deals, with a length of one month to one year. There were seven deals for a term of more than one year.

Texas Gas Transmission ranked first with 41pc of the total capacity traded on the top 10 pipelines, followed by Equitrans with 17pc and Northwest with 12pc.

The remaining ranked pipelines in descending order by released volumes were: Transcontinental Gas, Southern Natural Gas, Columbia Gas Transmission, Colorado Interstate Gas, Rockies Express, Algonquin Gas Transmission and Tennessee Gas.