Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator’s instructions) Our first question will come from the line of Lasan Johong with RBC Capital Markets.
Lasan Johong - RBC Capital Markets
Thank you. Can I ask a question on this DOE grant money? I’m a little confused as to what the schedule looks like. It sounds like you completed the program by 2012. But earlier on David said that it would take five years to complete two million meters. So I’m kind of wondering what I’m missing here?
David M. McClanahan
Lasan, I probably confused you. That’s our original schedule. Our original schedule had us completing it by 2014. With the DOE funding and $150 million of the stimulus funds goes to advanced metering. We will accelerate that from 2014 to 2012. And then we’ve got $50 million that we are going to start putting in our intelligent grid, our mid grid intelligent. So, those two components add up to the $200 million.
Lasan Johong - RBC Capital Markets
I got you. The other question I had was on the acquisition, a 100 million cubic feet per day of gathering, potentially going to 700 million cubic feet. What would trigger those growth patterns and how do we monitor that and CapEx spending associated with that? And is the acquisition in general what you had expected?
David M. McClanahan
The Shale and EnCana, these are two separate contracts; they have a very aggressive drilling program in the Haynesville area. So we expect based on their production drilling schedule and estimated production schedule that we’re going to ramp up to that 700 million after we get all these facilities completed. However, the company has volume commitments. So if they don’t hit their drilling schedule or their production schedule we have protections to get paid anyway. So we’re hoping they do well. There are some upsides if they in fact produce and we don’t have to rely on volume commitments. And of course we’d like to see them be very successful where they could go ahead and elect to expand these facilities and we would even put in more.
Lasan Johong - RBC Capital Markets
And do you think – is this acquisition as you would expect it, better than expected? How would you characterize it so far?
David M. McClanahan
We’re delighted with this acquisition. These contacts, we’ve been working on them for a number of months. They’re in our sweet spot. We gather gas in northern Louisiana, have for a long time. We wanted to be in the Haynesville Shale play. We had some minor activities in that area. So we’re really excited about this. I think it’s exactly what we wanted to do. And we’re just hoping it’s the start of something even bigger.
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