Coastal States Chemicals and Fertilizers
In December 2005, Bill Stock, general manager for the Louisiana Division of Coastal States Chemicals and Fertilizers, received a letter from Fred McNair of the Cajan Pipeline Company. which notified Coastal states that priorities had been established for the allocation of natural gas. The letter stated that Cajan Pipeline, the primary supplier of natural gas to Coastal States, might be instructed to curtail natural gas supplies to its industrial and commercial customers by as much as 40% during the ensuing winter months. Moreover, Cajan Pipeline had the approval of the Federal Power Commission(FPC) to curtail such supplies.
Possible curtailment was attributed to the priorities established for the use of natural gas:
First priority: residential and commercial heating
Second priority: commercial and industrial users that use natural gas as a source of raw material
Third priority: and industrial users Third priority commercial gas is used as whereby natural boiler fuel
Almost all of Coastal States' uses of natural gas were in the second and third priorities, Hence, its plants were certainly subject to brownouts, or natural gas curtailments, The of occurrence and severity of the brownouts depended on a number of complex factors First, Cajan Pipeline was part of an interstate, transmission network that delivered natural gas to residential and commercial buildings on the Atlantic coast and in Northeastern regions of the United States. Hence, the severity of the forthcoming winter in these regions would have a direct impact on the use of natural gas.