The Bakken Shale needs more natural gas takeaway capacity, North Dakota wants to encourage more in-state consumption of Bakken-sourced gas, and two entities — WBI Energy and a combo of Intensity Infrastructure Partners and Rainbow Energy Center — have each proposed similar (but not identical) cross-state pipelines that would help achieve those aims. But, assuming that two new pipelines would be overkill, which of the two proposals is the more likely to advance to a final investment decision (FID), construction and operation? In today’s RBN blog, we discuss the two competitors and the state of North Dakota’s impending decision on which pipeline project to support.
Since the early days of the Shale Era — and the RBN blogosphere — we’ve written frequently about the ongoing need to build more midstream infrastructure to serve Bakken production. Crude oil gathering systems and takeaway pipelines. Crude-by-rail terminals. Gas gathering systems and gas processing plants. Natural gas and NGL pipelines. Even now, with Bakken crude oil production holding steady at close to 1.2 MMb/d through most of the 2020s — far below the play’s 1.5-MMb/d peak six years ago — the push to develop more infrastructure continues. There are three primary drivers: (1) a gas-to-oil ratio (GOR) that has more than doubled since the mid-2010s, (2) steadily increasing production of NGLs (see our recently posted Two Gunslingers for more on that); and (3) gas-demand pull from new power generation, data center and industrial projects.
Today, our focus is on gas pipelines — especially two competing proposals to build large-diameter pipelines that would run from the Bakken to the eastern edge of North Dakota. (More on those in a moment.)
The vast majority of the nearly 3.5 Bcf/d produced in the Bakken heads toward the U.S. Midwest via TC Energy and ONEOK’s jointly owned Northern Border Pipeline (dark-yellow line in Figure 1 below), which transports both Western Canadian and Bakken gas. Much smaller volumes of Bakken gas flow into Pembina Pipeline Corp.’s Alliance Pipeline (light-purple line), whose flows are dominated by gas from Western Canada. Note that Alliance transports “rich” or “wet” gas with significant levels of NGLs that are largely removed at Pembina’s 2.1-Bcf/d Aux Sable gas processing complex just west of Chicago.
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