Movin’ On – The Infrastructure That Keeps Permian NGLs Flowing

The Permian is the country’s largest NGL-producing region, a trend that figures to continue over the next several years. By 2035, the basin is forecast to account for 53% of U.S. NGL production, up from about 44% today. Handling that growth will require a complex network of pipelines, fractionators, and other infrastructure, plus a handful of players adding capacity to ease congestion and provide more routes to market. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll look at the future of NGL infrastructure in the Permian and where all that additional production will ultimately end up.

This is the fourth blog in our series on the outlook for major U.S. producing basins, starting with the largest: the Permian. In our first blog, we discussed the major Permian gas pipeline projects scheduled to come online in 2026 and 2027, how much new capacity they will provide, and what the shift means for Waha prices, Gulf Coast balances and the U.S. natural gas market. In Part 2, we discussed the basin’s long-term gas pipeline projects and the challenges that could arise as that new infrastructure comes online. In our third piece, we discussed the Permian’s biggest natural gas producers and how they might respond to the new gas pipelines planned for the basin.

All of that sets the stage for today's blog on NGLs, but let’s add a little background. In the Permian, associated gas and NGLs have long been byproducts of crude oil production. So as oil output rises, the basin’s infrastructure needs to keep up with the gas and NGLs that come along for the ride. Significantly for our topic today, that means a lot of new gas processing plants need to be built, moved or expanded in the areas seeing high gas production growth. 

Gas processing plants separate NGLs from the gas stream. New additions to the fleet tend to be 275- or 300-MMcf/d cryogenic facilities that can extract a very high percentage of the liquids entrained in the gas stream. From the tailgate of the processing plant, pipelines take the NGLs as a mixed stream called “Y-grade” to fractionation centers where the mixed product is separated into “purity” form — ethane, propane, butanes and other NGL products — before heading to downstream markets, like petrochemical plants and export terminals (purity is a bit of a misnomer since some impurities still exist in the fracked NGLs). Today, we’ll begin by looking at processing and pipeline capacity and we’ll follow up with downstream fractionation and export facilities. 

From the Permian, recovered NGL production is currently about 3.6 MMb/d and is forecast to reach 4.8 MMb/d by 2030 and 5.4 MMb/d by 2035 (light-green bars in Figure 1 below). These recovered volumes account for the economics of ethane recovery, including ethane rejection, which is when ethane is left in the natural gas stream because recovery is uneconomic. They also reflect contractual agreements, such as minimum volume commitments (MVCs), that can incentivize recovery even when rejection would otherwise be economic.