M-K's Pipe

Statisticians comparing May 1930 and May 1929 business found many decreases, few increases. According to the most recent Crandall Pierce Business Index, last month showed freight car loadings down 9%, commodity prices down 6%, automobile production down 31%, pig iron production down 13%. Among the comparatively few increases were commercial failures, up 9%. Yet last week one young industry prospered and expanded, cheered by its demands an old industry. For when Missouri-Kansas Pipe Line Co. announced that it would build a 1,250-mi. natural gas pipe line from the Texas Panhandle to Indianapolis, it evidenced not only increasing activity in the natural gas field but also helped to stabilize a sagging steel production through huge orders for steel pipe.

The new M-K line will outdistance the 700-mi. Insull-Doherty Amarillo line from Texas to Chicago (TIME, March 17) and will be the longest transmission system in the U. S. Natural gas will be distributed through Missouri-Kansas subsidiaries in five states (Kansas, Missouri, Indiana, Kentucky, Illinois). M-K has also contracted to supply those cities which North American Light & Power Co. is serving (through subsidiaries) with manufactured gas in Illinois and Missouri. Distribution will be carried out by a new Missouri-Kansas company, Panhandle Eastern Co., with a potential daily capacity of 250,000,000 cubic feet of gas. But Missouri-Kansas will need many a new gas field, and many a new customer before it can surpass the 1929 record of the biggest U. S. natural gas corporation-- Columbia Gas & Electric. Last year Columbia sold 144.6 billion cubic feet of natural gas to 1,000,000 customers.

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