The handful of midstreamers that have built out and/or acquired the sour gas treatment facilities, acid gas injection wells and other assets E&Ps need to exploit the Northern Delaware Basin’s crude-oil-saturated rock are sittin’ pretty. Put simply, they anticipated what is now a race among several leading producers to “Drill, baby, drill!” in Lea County, NM, and nearby areas, where the initial production (IP) rates for crude are sky-high but the associated gas has elevated levels of hydrogen sulfide (H2S) and carbon dioxide (CO2) that have to be dealt with. In today’s RBN blog, we continue our look at the sour-gas-related assets in the region with a review of what Targa Resources, Enterprise Products Partners and MPLX own.
The RBN NATGAS Haynesville is a weekly natural gas fundamentals analysis focused on supply, flow, and LNG-driven demand dynamics within the Haynesville basin.
In Part 1 of this series, we said that southeastern New Mexico is the epicenter of U.S. crude oil production growth, with Eddy and Lea counties accounting for an astounding 52% of U.S. production growth from 2020-24, a four-year gain of nearly 1 MMb/d in just two counties! That growth, which has continued through the first nine months of 2025, came as a result of producers like EOG Resources, Devon Energy, Mewbourne Oil, Occidental Petroleum and Matador Resources perfecting their drilling-and-completion techniques and — with their midstream partners — solving the area’s #1 challenge: dealing with elevated levels of H2S and CO2 in much of the associated gas that emerges from many wells there, especially in Lea County.
We also looked at how high the H2S and CO2 concentrations can be and the approaches midstream companies can use to bring down those levels. Generally speaking, the most effective way to slash H2S and CO2 content in associated gas is to run the gas through a centralized amine treatment facility, then compress the resulting H2S/CO2 mix into a supercritical liquid and inject it into an acid gas injection (AGI) well for permanent sequestration. (A bonus: The CO2 sequestration can provide federal tax credits.)
Today, we begin our promised review of the sour-gas-related assets owned by the leading midstreamers in this particularly productive — and uniquely challenging — part of the Permian.
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About the song
“New Mexico” was written by Johnny Johnson and Leon Lambson. It appears as the third song on side two of Johnny Cash’s 13th studio album, The Original Sun Sound of Johnny Cash. It was never released as a single. The song portrays the troubles that some cowboys encountered while driving a herd of cattle across New Mexico, only to find no paycheck at the end of their endeavor. Personnel on the record were: Johnny Cash (lead vocal, rhythm acoustic guitar), Luther Perkins (lead electric guitar), and Marshall Grant (bass).
The Original Sun Sound of Johnny Cash is a compilation album of songs Cash recorded for Sam Phillips’s Sun Records label in Memphis from 1955 to 1958. Cash had three singles for Sun Records that charted, but none of them are on this collection. Released in November 1964, the album did not make the charts. One single was released from the LP.
Johnny Cash was an American country music singer and songwriter. Because of his all-black stage apparel, he became known as “The Man in Black.” He rose to popularity in the mid-1950s, performing rockabilly and country music with his Memphis trio, The Tennessee Three. He released 68 studio albums, four soundtrack albums, 16 live albums, 105 compilation albums and 70 singles and has sold over 90 million records worldwide. Cash appeared in 17 films and documentaries and several television shows, including The Johnny Cash Show, which he hosted for 58 episodes from 1969 to 1971. He has won four ACM Awards, an American Music Award, nine CMA Awards, 20 Grammy Awards and an MTV Video Music Award, and is a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame, Gospel Music Hall of Fame, Grammy Hall of Fame, and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Cash has received Kennedy Center Honors and has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Johnny Cash died in Nashville in September 2003 at 71.
