Movers and Shakers - Midstreamers Using Acquisitions and Buyouts to Shake Up Their Portfolios

You might have thought the flurry of acquisitions and buyout deals that midstream companies entered into over the past couple of years would have satisfied their evident desire to refocus, expand and reshape their businesses. But you’d be wrong. In the first half of 2025 — a period of considerable uncertainty in the energy industry — midstream players continued to buy and sell pipelines and other important assets at a frenetic pace. In today’s RBN blog, we discuss some of the more interesting recent transactions and what they tell us about the midstream space. 

There’s been so much midstream M&A and asset trading in the post-pandemic era that we put together not one but two Drill Down Reports on the topic, the first in late 2023 and the second in February. Consider the magnitude and significance of the nine-, 10- and 11-figure deals we highlighted in those summaries, which included Enterprise Products Partners’ acquisition of Navitas Midstream and Piñon Midstream (total value $4.2 billion); Energy Transfer’s purchase of Crestwood Energy Partners, WTG Midstream and Lotus Midstream ($11.8 billion); and ONEOK’s deals to buy — get this — Magellan Midstream Partners, EnLink Midstream and the Midland Basin part of Medallion Midstream for a cool $29 billion.

And don’t forget Sunoco LP’s May 2024 acquisition of NuStar Energy ($7.3 billion). Or Plains All American, which in January announced three smaller deals (including the acquisition of Ironwood Midstream) totaling $670 million and oh, by the way, in mid-June reached an agreement to sell its Canadian NGL business to Keyera Corp. for C$5.15 billion (US$3.25 billion). And that’s not all Plains is up to. In February it acquired the remaining 50% interest in the Cheyenne Pipeline (a 94-mile crude oil pipeline in Wyoming) and in May it closed on the $55 million purchase of a crude oil gathering system in the Midland.

Today, we’re going to focus on a handful of deals that offer a representative sample of recent purchases and sales.

Brookfield Infrastructure Partners/Colonial Pipeline

We begin with a big one: the plan by Brookfield Infrastructure Partners (BIP) and its institutional partners to buy the Colonial Pipeline system from its five co-owners — Koch Industries, KKR, pension fund Caisse de Dépôt et Placement du Québec, Shell, and Australian investor fund Industry Funds Management — for about $9 billion. The deal is expected to close later this year.

The 5,500-mile Colonial system (green lines in Figure 1 below) is a critically important refined products delivery network. Its primary route (from Houston to Linden, NJ) consists of four distinct segments, which, like the “arms” and “legs” of an X, meet at Greensboro, NC. One of the two Houston-to-Greensboro lines moves gasoline (Line 1; capacity 1.4 MMb/d) and the other line (Line 2; capacity 1.2 MMb/d) is dedicated to moving middle distillates (diesel and jet fuel).