Proposed Pipeline Would Transport Marcellus Resources to Gulf Coast

• Marie Cusick
  BioRecent Stories

  

  Marie Cusick was the Harrisburg reporter for StateImpact Pennsylvania.

A pair of energy companies has announced a joint venture to upgrade infrastructure to transport natural gas liquids from the Marcellus and Appalachian regions to processing facilities in Texas and Louisiana.
Boardwalk Pipeline Partners LP, and the energy infrastructure firm Williams plan to upgrade existing pathways and build a new “Bluegrass Pipeline”, which could transport up to 400,000 barrels of natural gas liquids per day, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

About 40 percent of the project was characterized as new construction, mostly throughout the Marcellus region. The company said exact locations have not yet been determined.
The plan awaits approvals from the companies’ boards and from regulators, which the firms hope to have sometime this year so the project can be put into service by the second half of 2015.
This agreement between Tulsa-based Williams and Boardwalk, a subsidiary of the New York-based Loews Corp., is the latest attempt to break Appalachia’s bottleneck of oil and gas resources.
As development in the region’s Marcellus and Utica shales has ramped up, producers have found themselves stuck with an underdeveloped infrastructure that can’t yet handle processing or transporting all the oil and gas extracted here. Williams said the volume of natural gas liquids in the Northeast is expected to exceed 1.2 million barrels per day by 2020.

Editor's Picks