New Sunoco Pipeline Will Transport "Wet Gas" Products To Philadelphia

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.

August 14, 2012 | 2:59 PM

Kim Paynter / WHYY/Newsworks.org

Workers build a new pipeline in Susquehanna County, Pa.org

The Inquirer examines how Sunoco has tweaked plans for its new Pennsylvania pipeline project, to adjust to the new “wet gas”-focused natural gas market:

The Mariner East project, which calls for repurposing an existing Sunoco pipeline that crosses Pennsylvania, was originally conceived in 2010 as a way to find markets for Marcellus ethane by sending the material to Philadelphia for shipment by sea to Gulf Coast petrochemical plants. Those plants in Texas and Louisiana convert or “crack” ethane into a key ingredient used in the manufacturing of plastics.
But the project has been reimagined in recent months to include propane, which, like ethane, is found in abundance in the rich “wet gas” produced in the Marcellus wells in southwestern Pennsylvania.
Marcellus producers have already begun trucking propane to Sunoco’s Marcus Hook location for loading on ships for export to Europe, according to MarkWest Energy Partners L.P., which is working with Sunoco on the Mariner project. Propane fetches a premium price in Europe as a heating fuel and a raw material for chemical producers. A cross-state pipeline would be able to carry far more fuel to Southeastern Pennsylvania than trucks, requiring construction of a fuel terminal and also potentially a processing plant to separate ethane and propane from natural gas liquids.