Posted on 05/10/2011 2:02:21 PM PDT by thackney
As weve noted previously, the shale gas production boom is helping lift chemical industry profits and paving the way for further U.S. chemical industry expansion.
Another beneficiary of the gas production expansion is companies that process natural gas, which is often called fractionation.
Natural gas usually needs to have impurities removed from it before shortly after it is produced from wells and can be moved via pipeline. This includes natural gas liquids such as propane, butane, pentane, hexane and heptane which can be very valuable products themselves.
Since many of the shale gas formations that are being tapped are particularly wet with NGLs, that means theres a need for more processing capacity.
Enterprise Products Partners said Monday it will expand its Mont Belvieu, Texas, fractionation capacity by about 7,500 barrels per day, with plans to have the facilities online by early 2013.
DCP Partners and Targa Resources also have plans for an added 100,000 barrels per day in capacity at Mont Belvieu.
These projects and others announced in the past week alone will increase capacity in Mont Belvieu by 32 percent, the folks at Tudor Pickering Holt & Co. say in a research note today. Thats on top of the 14 percent expansion already underway.
All told, Mont Belvieu could go from 860,000 barrels per day capacity to 1,253,000 barrels per day by 2013. Now, what does that mean for NGL prices?
After a decade of flat NGL production, it will be hard to absorb that capacity increase without reverberations, TPH notes.
Thats a nice way of saying theyre gonna go down.
I’ll take all that iso-octo-heptane “contaminant” the driller cares to dispose of!
FANTASTIC NEWS!!!
Guess I am going to put in Propane for backup in my house after all!
Home grown energy - no more money to Sand Countries or that big Pineapple Haystack in Venezuela.
If I could find a place to refill, I’d switch my rig to CNG today. We have one refueling station in the entire state (Billings, MT)
And there you have the problem with CNG....lack of infrastructure. It is either going to take a law and/or a subsidy to get gas stations to include CNG fuel-up points.
***This includes natural gas liquids such as propane, butane, pentane, hexane and heptane which can be very valuable products themselves.***
In N W New Mexico some of us tried to use “drip gas” in our autos. It worked but knocked and shot out clouds of water vapor.
One man blew up his engine using drip gas. All the wells around now have locks on their outlets, and if you get caught, WOW! You are also charged with burning untaxed fuel in your auto.
I am guessing home refueling units will build the market first. Then after there are more vehicles, CNG commercial stations will be economic.
I'm more of the opinion that CNG will show up in heavy vehicles (long haul trucks) and that truck stops will be the first wide-spread refueling option. If you have a home refueling station, what happens when you're away from home (unless your CNG is multi-fuel...and necessarily multi-tank)?? At this point in time, the only place the home-fueling station really makes sense is for the "heavy commuter" whose main travel is home-work-home. Now, admittedly that's not a small market, but that also means that said commuter also needs a second, non-CNG vehicle for long trips.
Either way....it'll be "interesting" to see how it develops. And I'm darned glad to see an abundant new energy source showing up.
CNG vehicles NOW!
Amen!
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