Rustys Blog

We’ve talked a lot here about NGL storage in Mont Belvieu and Conway.  Those are the big underground storage caverns washed out of salt formations thousands of feet below the surface.  But those are not the only places where NGLs are stored in underground salt caverns.  Two important facilities, especially for West Coast NGL markets are located in the seemingly unlikely locations of Bumstead, AZ and Adamana, AZ.  Today and in a later follow up we’ll look at why these facilities are in Arizona, how they got there, and the unique niche they fill in the NGL marketplace.

The new domestic energy rush has supplied North America with a potent new cocktail of hydrocarbons. Not only are we producing more oil and gas here than we have in decades, but we are producing more of certain kinds of hydrocarbons than North America’s existing energy infrastructure is built to handle.

We’re talking about the “C” word: Condensates. Today we introduce a blog series on condensates.

As RBN Energy explained last February (see “neither fish nor fowl”), condensates are a highly volatile hydrocarbon mixture that is classified somewhere between crude oil and natural gas liquids. Condensates are showing up in abundance both in new “wet gas” plays, where they drop down as liquids from gas streams during the field production process, and in oil shale plays, where condensate is part of the liquid coming straight out of a wellhead.