Cactus Pipeline

The Plains All American (PAA) Cactus Pipeline comes online in the West Texas Permian this month (April 2015). Cactus will bring up to 250 Mb/d of crude and condensate from Midland and McCamey in the Permian to Gardendale, TX - the heart of the Eagle Ford shale – linking the two basins for the first time by pipeline.  It also forms a major component of an expanded pipeline and dock infrastructure owned by a combination of PAA and Enterprise Product Partners (EPD) set to deliver as much as 600 Mb/d of crude and condensate to Corpus Christi and 470 Mb/d to Houston by the end of 2015. Today we describe how a good deal of those deliveries will be processed condensate eligible for export.

By Q2 of 2015, the Plains and Enterprise joint venture pipeline in the Eagle Ford will carry up to 470 Mb/d of crude and condensate to market in Houston and Corpus Christi including barrels shipped from the Permian Basin on the Cactus pipeline. This pipeline expansion will easily make the two-midstream operators the largest players in the Eagle Ford market. On top of that, Enterprise already has a leg up in the race to crank up condensate exports – having recently won one of the coveted BIS letters. Today we describe recent expansions in these two company’s Eagle Ford networks.

Permian Basin crude production is expanding rapidly. At over 1.5 MMb/d it already represents nearly 19 percent of total US crude output. Midstream companies are busy developing more than a dozen gathering system extensions and additions to deliver Permian production to about 1 MMBbl of mainline pipeline capacity coming online between the start of 2013 and 2015. In today’s blog we detail planned improvements to the Basin and Cactus pipelines.