Jul. 1--BLUE MOUND -- Looking like the engine room of some vast ship sailing the prairie near Blue Mound, the Rockies Express Pipeline compressor station fired up its motors Tuesday.

Huge Caterpillar-built engines, V-16s and V-12s generating 7,500 and 5,500 horsepower, are used to power compressors that speed natural gas along the pipeline from wells in Colorado to customers as far away as Ohio.

The $60 million compressor station has five engines side by side, which can be brought on and off line to punch up the gas delivery rate according to customer demand. About 12 new jobs are associated with the compressor station and pipeline maintenance operations.

The recently completed Central Illinois section of the 42-inch pipeline forms part of the 639 mile-long Rockies Express-East pipeline. It stretches from Missouri to Ohio and employed some 1,500 construction workers over the past year. The full pipeline, from its wells in Colorado, measures 1,679 miles and will be able to pump up to 1.8 billion cubic feet of gas a day at pressures of 1,400 pounds per square inch, enough to fuel 4.1 million homes.

More than 20 big customers, such as utility companies, are lined up along the way to receive the gas and distribute it to homes and businesses. In Illinois, Ameren Corp. alone is buying 140,000 cubic feet a day. The companies that created the pipeline, Kinder Morgan Energy Partners, Sempra Pipelines and Storage and ConocoPhillips, said those customer deals had to be in place to satisfy federal regulators the project was worthwhile and to justify its $6.6 billion price tag.

"We had to have commitments there was a delivery market for this gas," said Rockies Express spokesman Allen Fore. "Gas is cheaper and plentiful out in the Rocky Mountains, but there was no infrastructure to get it to these Midwestern markets in Illinois, Indiana and Ohio."

Accelerating demand for Rockies Express clean-burning gas looks like a sure bet stretching into the future. Predictions for U.S. demand for natural gas are the need for the fuel will jump 50 percent by 2020 and more pipelines will be needed.

And the new pipeline has time on its side, too. The natural gas field it taps has at least enough gas to meet demands for the next 70 years, and the pipeline itself will last nearly as long.

"Technology has got to where the steel in the pipe is a lot better and the coatings in the pipe are a lot better," said Garvin Suggs, the chief inspector of the Blue Mound compressor station. "The pipeline is likely to go 50 or 60 years."

treid@herald-review.com|421-7977

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