The Permian’s Midland and Delaware basins have seen their share of midstream success stories the past few years — many of them privately backed efforts to gain a foothold and then expand into the big time. Navitas Midstream Partners (later sold to Enterprise Products Partners) comes to mind; so do Oryx Midstream and Brazos Midstream. Now comes Vaquero Midstream — vaquero, of course, being Spanish for cowboy — the scrappy developer of a gas gathering and processing network in the Delaware. As we discuss in today’s RBN blog, Vaquero recently announced plans to build a new high-pressure pipeline that will double the capacity of its gathering system and a new processing plant that will give it a total of 600 MMcf/d of processing capacity with a slew of interconnections to key gas and NGL takeaway pipelines.
First, an explanation of our song title and why it fits today’s topic. “Rhinestone Cowboy” may conjure up images of country music’s Glen Campbell duded up in fancy, gem-encrusted attire, ”riding out on a horse in a Star-Spangled rodeo.” But the song’s lyrics reveal it’s really the story of a determined, hard-working singer with a dream who won’t give up ’til he’s “where the lights are shining on me ... like a Rhinestone Cowboy.”
That’s also the story of Vaquero Midstream, which over the past nine years has been operating and expanding a network for gathering rich, NGL-packed associated gas in the West Texas part of the Delaware and shuttling it to a processing complex where it is separated into residue gas and mixed NGLs. That network, which we first discussed in 2017, currently includes more than 200 miles of low- and high-pressure lines (dark-green lines in Figure 1 below), plus two 200-MMcf/d gas processing plants at Vaquero’s Caymus complex (magenta star) just over the line in Pecos County, near the all-important Waha gas hub (magenta circle; more on that in a moment.) Caymus I came online in 2016, and Caymus II started up in 2018.
Figure 1. Vaquero Midstream’s Gas Gathering and Processing Network. Source: RBN
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