Natural gas and NGL production growth in the Marcellus/Utica slowed and then leveled off in the early 2020s, largely due to pipeline carryover constraints. Still, the Northeast remains a key supplier of natural gas and NGL “purity products,” and Energy Transfer’s NGL pipelines and the Philadelphia-area marine terminal continue to play a critical role in the ‘equilibrium of the ethane and LPG markets in the region. On today’s RBN blog, we continue our series on the robust and growing networks of U.S. NGL pipelines, fractionators, and export terminals, this time taking a look at the Mariner West and Mariner East pipeline systems Energy Transfer and the company’s Marcus Hook terminal.
In Part 1 in this series, we said that the rise in U.S. NGL production in the 2010s was accompanied by massive construction of NGL-related infrastructure—from gas gathering systems and power plants to gas processing to NGL pipelines, fractionators, steam crackers consuming ethane. along the Gulf Coast (and west of Pennsylvania) and export terminals capable of loading and shipping ethane, propane, butanes and natural gasoline. While we’ve written countless blogs about this construct, what we haven’t done, at least until now, is discuss in holistic terms the NGL Nets that a handful of large midstream companies own and operate.
Since Energy Transfer (ET) owns the major midstream systems for NGLs in both Texas and the Northeast, it seemed logical to start our new series with them. In Part 1, we focused on ET’s interconnected NGL-related assets in the Lone Star State, which include gas processing plants; pipelines for transporting mixed NGLs (also known as grade Y) to the Mont Belvieu fractionation center (where ET has seven fractionators and is finishing an eighth); underground salt cavern storage; purity product pipelines from Mont Belvieu to Nederland, TX; and Nederland Terminal, which has product refrigeration capacity, dedicated cold storage and several export docks.
