natural gas liquid

The AltaGas/Royal Vopak Ridley Island Propane Export Terminal in the Port of Prince Rupert, BC, is poised to receive and load its first Very Large Gas Carrier (VLGC) any day now, a milestone that will make it Western Canada’s first LPG export facility and only the second such terminal in the greater Pacific Northwest region. With a capacity of 40 Mb/d, the facility is likely to provide a healthy boost to Western Canadian propane exports in 2019, easing oversupply conditions in the region while also providing producers with enhanced access to overseas markets, particularly in Asia. Today, we take a closer look at the new Prince Rupert facility and what it means for the Western Canadian propane market.

There is a close, symbiotic relationship between brine and natural gas liquids.  Most NGL storage is in huge underground caverns washed out of salt formations thousands of feet below the surface.  That washing or ‘leaching’ process makes lots of brine.  When the storage caverns or wells go into service, the NGLs replace the brine. But when NGLs are removed from the wells, brine must displace the NGL barrels.  Nowhere is this relationship between brine and NGLs more entwined with the history of the facilities than at Bumstead and Adamana, two storage facilities in Arizona.  Today we continue our series looking at the unique niche these two operations fill in the NGL marketplace and where they may be headed in the future.

Natural gas processing plants are being built or expanded at a feverish pace.  At least 90 projects are in the works around the U.S., expected to add more than 15 Bcf/d of capacity according to the latest Bentek NGL Facilities Databank numbers.  How do the economics of these investments work? We know that it is a lot more complicated than a simple frac spread.  But does that mean the calculations must be exclusively the purview of engineers armed with gas plant optimization models?  Heck no.  Anybody, even an MBA with a spreadsheet, a few standard factors and a gas analysis can figure out how a gas processing plant makes money.  So to prove that point today we’ll dive one more time into natural gas processing economics to understand how the composition of an inlet gas stream is converted to outlet streams of natural gas liquids and residue gas.

Unlike pipelines that take a long time to build and only deliver to a handful of destinations, rail freight cars offer the flexibility to deliver anywhere across North America. The rail freight industry can load, store and transport different NGLs (including those NGL products that must be transported under high pressure) as well as crude and petroleum products. Rail infrastructure is mostly already in place so new routes can easily be brought on line. That’s why rail freight has been used successfully by the energy industry for over 100 years as - a “pipeline on wheels”. Today we look at the rail tank car business for moving NGL and petroleum products.