NGL production in Western Canada hit an all-time high in 2025 and looks to be headed even higher in the years ahead. Major midstream players, such as AltaGas, have been undertaking infrastructure expansions to deal with all the additional gas processing, Y-grade fractionation and product exports.
Production of lease condensate at the wellhead and plant condensate from processing natural gas liquids (NGLs) has increased rapidly in the Ohio Utica over the past two years. Timely investment by local refiner Marathon and infrastructure developments to ship condensate to Gulf Coast refiners have proved the primary market for Utica condensate so far. The proximity of the region to diluent pipelines to Canada has also prompted infrastructure projects. Today we describe projects to deliver condensate to Alberta.
In the five years since gas production began to take off in the Marcellus, gas processing capacity in the northeast has expanded nearly 13 times over from 600 MMcf/d to 7,600 MMcf/d. Natural gas liquids (NGL) production from those plants began to expand significantly in 2011 and is now over 245 Mb/d. Midstream companies have developed gas processing infrastructure from a small group of stand-alone plants into a fully integrated system designed to operate without the luxury of significant NGL storage capacity. Today we begin a new series describing how the innovative infrastructure build=out has overcome regional constraints.
By Al Troner, President Asia Pacific Energy Consulting (APEC)
U.S. production of field (lease) condensates is growing like crazy, especially in the Eagle Ford. There is way too much of this material for it to be absorbed into traditional crude blending markets. At the same time the production of plant condensate, a.k.a. natural gasoline, is also increasing along with the yield of all other products from natural gas processing plants. A glut of condensates has developed and is getting worse. Clearly this is an opportunity for new market development, and the bizdev community is hard at work coming up with concepts, projects and proposals to use all of this material in the U.S. and in export markets. But there is a problem. Condensate markets in different geographies seem to have little in common with each other. It’s like walking through the looking glass. One term can have several meanings. One meaning can be ascribed to several terms. Today we launch a RBN blog series to make sense of it all.
