Fewer than a handful of US midstream companies own and operate extensive NGL networks that do it all: extract blended NGLs from associated gas at their processing plants, transport this “grade Y” to their facilities to ‘storage of the underground salt cavern in Mont Belvieu, fractionated. they blended NGLs into so-called “purity products” in their fractionators, then piped that ethane, LPG and other products to domestic end users or company-owned export docks. Enterprise Products Partners is a member of this select group, and as we discuss in today’s RBN blog, its NGL network, which stretches from the Appalachians to the Permian and the Rockies, is the largest.
As we said a Part 1 of this series, the surge in U.S. NGL production during the early years of the Shale era was accompanied by a massive expansion of the infrastructure needed to bring NGLs from the wellhead to consumers ethane, propane and other NGL purity products. While we’ve written countless blogs about the pieces of infrastructure development, what we haven’t done, at least until now, is discuss NGL in holistic terms. Nets that a few large midstream companies have come to own and operate. We started our review with Energy Transfer, owner of NGL Networks Texas and (as we discussed in part 2) the northeast too.
In Part 3, we shifted our focus to Targa Resources, which, in addition to being a major gas gatherer and processor in the Permian and a number of other producing areas, owns the Grand Prix NGL pipeline system and is a of the main players of Mont Belvieu, the fractionation center east of Houston. Targa also owns and operates a huge LPG export terminal along the Houston Ship Channel in Galena Park.
Today is the Enterprise’s turn. Simply put, Enterprise is an NGL giant. So much so, we’ll need two blocks to cover all of their NGL assets. We’ll start with the company’s nearly 10 Bcf/d of net gas processing capacity, about three-quarters of which is in the Permian, Eagle Ford, Piceance and Green River producing areas (the latter in Colorado and Wyoming, respectively). Within the Permian, Enterprise has seven plants with a combined processing capacity of 1.6 Bcf/d in the Delaware Basin and five plants with slightly more than 1 Bcf/d of capacity in the Midland Basin. In the Eagle Ford, in South Texas, it has eight plants with 2.2 Bcf/d of capacity, and in the Rockies, it owns another 3.6 Bcf/d (2.2 Bcf/da Piceance, 800 MMcf/da Green River and 600 MMcf/from the San Juan Basin in New Mexico). The company also owns another 1.3 Bcf/d of processing capacity along the Louisiana/Mississippi coast (associated gas processing from the Gulf of Mexico) and another 410 MMcf/d of capacity in the areas of production from Cotton Valley and Wilcox-Woodbine of Texas.
