Shock & Awe: Enterprise Announces Slew Of New Capital Projects To Support Growing NGL Franchise

Crude-oil-focused production growth in the Permian is generating increasing volumes of associated gas that need to be processed and mixed NGLs that need to be piped to Mont Belvieu, fractionated and exported. All that suggests the need for still more infrastructure — processing plants, NGL pipelines, fractionators and export facilities — and Enterprise Products Partners, a top-tier NGL midstreamer, recently laid out a multibillion-dollar plan to help Permian producers keep pace. In today’s RBN blog, we discuss the new set of projects Enterprise has in the works. 

In their first earnings calls of 2025, the handful of large midstream companies that provide the gamut of “wellhead-to-water” services in Texas laid out plans for yet another round of projects — everything from gas processing plants and takeaway pipelines to fractionators and export terminal expansions. At the same time, many of these same midstreamers expressed a degree of caution about overbuilding. They sought to reassure Wall Street that they were only approving plans underpinned by strong commercial support. In today’s RBN blog, we discuss the latest capital spending plans of this select, upper tier of midstream service providers. 

Less than a handful of U.S. midstream companies own and operate extensive NGL networks that do it all: extract mixed NGLs from associated gas at their processing plants, transport that “Y-grade” to their underground salt-cavern storage facilities in Mont Belvieu, fractionate mixed NGLs into so-called “purity products” at their fractionators, then pipe that ethane, LPG and other products either to domestic end-users or to company-owned export docks. Enterprise Products Partners is a member of that select group and, as we discuss in today’s RBN blog, its NGL network — which stretches from Appalachia to the Permian to the Rockies — is the most extensive.