My career has been heavily pipeline transportation focused – hence the book on pipeline transportation! In the last several years I have been working more with Local Distribution Companies (LDCs). While I worked in the pipeline world, I had always considered LDCs as a flavor of pipeline, just like intrastate pipelines, midstream, and interstates are pipelines.

Most LDC’s accept nominations! Doesn’t that make them a pipeline?  Not really!!

All natural-gas LDCs are pipelines in the literal sense. They are physical pipelines in the ground that are used to distribute natural gas. Some LDCs come closer to acting like an interstate or intrastate pipeline because of deregulation – in the instances where they are required to support transportation on behalf of others – such as marketers and shippers.

Acting as a pipeline is only one of the many services that LDCs perform. There are a host of others.

This is the first of a series of posts on LDCs. I thought I understood them. I now know that I have a lot to learn from them.