Force majeure announced at El Paso Pipeline, Seligman station says

Force majeure declarations on US Southwest gas trunk lines follow a well-worn script: flow nominations are curtailed at the affected station, and the transmission channel runs through regional basis rather than the Henry Hub front month. The El Paso system feeds West Texas and New Mexico supply toward California and the Desert Southwest, so past episodes of this kind have tended to widen the gap between Permian-area pricing, which can weaken sharply when takeaway is constrained, and downstream western hubs, which firm on reduced receipts. The distinction worth drawing is between a station-level outage and a broader system restriction: the former is typically a days-long operational event with basis effects that mean-revert, the latter can compound if storage positions are already tight. Kinder Morgan's operational notices and the pipeline's electronic bulletin board postings are the tells for duration, and whether the curtailment bites during a high-demand heating or cooling window determines how much of the basis move sticks. Power markets in the receiving region bear watching where gas-fired generation is on the margin.