Susan Brothers began her career in the energy industry in 1979 in Houston. After positions at several trading companies in the early '80s, she spent five years learning the propane business at Ferrellgas, and in 1990 moved to Phibro Energy. She spent the next 30 years in refinery supply and trading, retiring from Valero in 2020 as Executive Director of NGL and Propylene Trading.
The South Texas NGL market has always been a world of its own, a self-contained liquids ecosystem running from Brownsville to Markham, a distant 200 miles from the NGL epicenter at Mont Belvieu. In recent years, however, the South Texas market has been undergoing radical change, first with the emergence of the Eagle Ford basin, then with the onslaught of Permian production and, most recently, with the aptly named EPIC NGL Pipeline and new fractionation capacity in greater Corpus Christi. More supply and demand are on the way, with new pipes, exports, and the largest ethane-only petrochemical plant in the world under construction. And with these developments, a strategy by several large, well-financed players has emerged – to develop an NGL storage and fractionation hub competitive with Month Belvieu. Today, we begin a series to examine the South Texas NGL market and how changes there will impact flows, utilization, and pricing across North America and beyond.
