White Paper Shines Light on Marcellus/Utica NGL Supply Chain

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One of the great stories about shale drilling in the Marcellus/Utica that often gets overlooked is the story of NGLs–or natural gas liquids. NGLs include “other” hydrocarbons that come out of the borehole–like ethane, pentane, butane, isobutane and propane. Ethane is typically the most voluminous NGL coming out of the ground and is the chemical that feeds giant cracker plants that turn it into ethylene–the raw feedstock used to make plastics and anti-freeze. The NGL market has been transformed, seemingly overnight, by the abundance of NGLs in the Marcellus/Utica region–now the #1 NGL producing region in the country. Tracking how much natural gas and NGLs flows through pipelines is a service offered by Genscape–a great company with great people. They use innovative technologies and techniques to figure out how much gas and/or liquids are flowing in a pipeline–including infrared cameras! They also use cameras mounted near facilities to snap pictures of tanker trucks exiting a facility. All in an effort to estimate how much of a given product is moving through the system. It’s really cool stuff. If you want to know who’s processing and flowing how much natural gas, NGLs or other types of power (even including electric power), Genscape is the company to use. So when we spotted a new white paper from Genscape titled “Disruptions & Vulnerabilities Impacting the Evolving Marcellus/Utica NGL Supply Chain,” we knew we had to read it. The white paper highlights the impacts of NGL expansion in the northeast, vulnerabilities to the NGL supply chain, infrastructure trends, and expectations for pricing…

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