Gas Processing Plant

Supplies of natural gas liquids, especially propane, have become increasingly tight in recent months, with prices reaching multi-year highs in the U.S. and Canada. Despite the strong price signals, increasing production is typically a lengthy, complex, and expensive process involving producers drilling new wells to yield more liquids-rich natural gas and crude oil. There is also another way to increase supplies: by extracting them from already processed and pipelined natural gas via a straddle plant that more intensively recovers additional NGLs, such as propane, from the existing gas supply. Canada’s Wolf Midstream has recently sanctioned such a plant, as well as a related pipeline and extraction plant in Alberta that it hopes to bring into service in 2023. In today’s blog, we examine this new straddle plant and Western Canada’s current propane supply situation.

A lot of the big run-up in U.S. crude oil production since 2010 is tied to horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing in the Eagle Ford, the Bakken and other tight-oil plays. But while oil from shale and other reservoirs with very low permeability has grabbed the headlines, crude production from enhanced oil recovery (EOR) in older conventional oil fields—especially using CO2 flooding techniques--is on the rise. Crude production from CO2-based EOR operations could more than double by 2020 (to 600 Mb/d or higher), providing yet another boost to U.S. energy independence. In today’s blog, we begin a look at enhanced oil recovery, with a focus on techniques that use large volumes of carbon dioxide.