Regional Overviews and Links to Pipeline Companies

Through a series of interconnecting interstate and intrastate pipelines the transportation of natural gas from one location to another within the United States has become a relatively seamless operation. While intrastate pipeline systems often transports natural gas from production areas directly to consumers in local markets, it is the interstate pipeline system's long-distance, high-capacity trunklines that supply most of the major natural gas markets in the United States.

• Of the six geographic regions defined in this analysis, the Southwest Region contains the largest number of individual natural gas pipeline systems (more than 90) and the highest level of pipeline mileage (over 106,000).
• The Central Region produces more gas than it consumes and is a net exporter of natural gas. In recent years, expanding natural gas production in Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah has prompted the construction of several new intra and interstate pipelines in the region and the proposed development of several more over the next several years.
• Although the Midwest Region still receives most of it natural gas supplies from the Southwest Region's producing areas, since the early 1980's new natural gas pipelines from Canada have grown in importance, currently accounting for over one-quarter of the natural gas pipeline capacity entering the region.
• The Northeast Region's natural gas pipeline network has access to supplies from most major domestic gas-producing areas and from Canada. Domestic gas flows into the region from the Southeast into Virginia and West Virginia, and from the Midwest into West Virginia and Pennsylvania. Canadian imports come into the region principally through New York, Maine, and New Hampshire.
• In the Southeast Region most of the twenty-one interstate pipelines serving the region receive most of their supplies from the Gulf of Mexico or from the States of Texas and/or Louisiana.
• Slightly more than half the capacity entering the Western Region is on pipeline systems that carry natural gas from the Rocky Mountain area and the Permian and San Juan basins of Texas and New Mexico. These systems enter the region at the New Mexico-Arizona and Nevada-Utah state lines. The rest of the pipeline capacity into the region enters from Wyoming and/or from Canada at the British Columbia-Idaho and Washington State border crossings.