Keystone 2.0? Company Announces Plans For PA-To-Texas Marcellus Pipeline

Scott Detrow

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Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.

Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.

Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

January 5, 2012 | 3:29 PM

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Anti-pipeline activists protested the Keystone XL project at the White House last year

A Texas-based company plans on building a 1,230-mile pipeline to transport ethane from the Marcellus Shale to the Gulf Coast, according to the West Virginia State Journal:

Enterprise Products Partners L.P. of Houston announced this week that it has received sufficient transportation commitments to support development of its 1,230-mile Appalachia-to-Texas pipeline to deliver ethane to the Gulf Coast.
The pipeline will be known as the ATEX Express. It will deliver up to 190,000 barrels per day of ethane produced from Marcellus and Utica shales in West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio.
Ethane is a byproduct from production of natural gas in wells drilled and hydraulically fractured in Marcellus and Utica shale formations. West Virginia officials are trying to persuade chemical companies to build large operations known as crackers to process ethane close to the wells rather than ship it to other regions.

Nearly 600 miles of new pipeline would need to be constructed during the project’s first phase.
Considering environmentalists’ opposition to hydraulic fracturing, the pipeline could spur protests mirroring the anti-Keystone XL demonstrations that sprung up near the White House this fall. Environmental advocates oppose the Keystone pipeline because the process of extracting oil from Alberta’s Tar Sands creates large amounts of greenhouse gasses. (For all the details on the Keystone pipeline, check out StateImpact Texas’ primer on the topic.)