ONEOK May Increase Capacity At Its Garden Creek II Natural Gas Processing Facility - September 2, 2014; Increased Storage Capacity Slated For New Town, North Dakota; Update On Vantage Pipeline (Tioga To Canada)

Interesting to say the least. Sent in by a reader. Platts is reporting:

ONEOK's newly opened 100,000 mcf/d Garden Creek II natural gas processing facility in eastern McKenzie County, North Dakota, may add another 18,000 b/d of natural gas liquids production to the region, a Platts analysis found Wednesday.

ONEOK Partners on Tuesday announced the plant is now operational, doubling capacity at the Garden Creek complex from 100,000 mcf/d to 200,000 mcf/d.

According to Maria Mejia, an analyst at Bentek, a unit of Platts, the Garden Creek I plant became operational in mid-2011 and has been operating at or above its nameplate capacity of 100,000 mcf/d since August 2012.

I track the ONEOK NG plants here.

Be careful on this one. The second paragraph says the capacity was doubled to 200,000 -- as noted in the paragraph, that's for the entire complex which has Garden Creek 1 and Garden Creek 2. There is a Garden Creek 3 proposed/under construction which may / may not be part of the same complex.

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The Wall Street Journal is reporting:

Pembina Pipeline Corporation is pleased to announce that it has entered into agreements to acquire the Vantage pipeline system and Mistral Midstream Inc.'s interest in the Saskatchewan Ethane Extraction Plant for total consideration of US$650 million.
 
Vantage is a recently constructed, approximately 700 kilometre ("km"), 40,000 barrel per day ("bpd"), high vapour pressure pipeline that originates in Tioga, North Dakota and terminates near Empress, Alberta. Vantage provides long-term, fee-for-service cash flow and strategic access to the prolific and growing North Dakota Bakken play for future natural gas liquids (NGL) opportunities. 

The Vantage pipeline can be increased to 60,000 bpd with minimum costs.

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Dakota Plains is reporting:

Dakota Plains Holdings, Inc. today announced that its Board of Directors and joint venture partner have approved the expansion of oil storage at its Pioneer Terminal in New Town, North Dakota. Construction of a third 90,000 barrel storage tank is set to immediately commence; regulatory permits and engineering design are complete and Dakota Plains expects the storage tank to be operational by summer 2015.

The Pioneer Terminal is located in the heart of the Bakken and Three Forks formations and currently has sustainable throughput capacity of 45,000 barrels of oil per day with onsite oil storage of 180,000 barrels. The addition of a third storage tank, recently announced Hiland Partners gathering pipeline, and anticipated expanded rail service will facilitate increasing the sustainable throughput rate to a unit train per day - equivalent to 80,000 barrels of oil per day.

On August 18, 2014, I posted an earlier story related to this announcement.  Wow, it's nice that these projects can all be done in-state, and not have to include Minnesota or Iowa to weigh in on these projects. This represents a lot of jobs for American men and women.
 

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Also, ABC News is reporting:

Dominion Resources, Duke Energy and other partners are proposing a $5 billion natural gas pipeline to connect the Southeast with the prodigious supplies of natural gas being produced in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia.

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Nothing About The Bakken

This is an interesting psychological insight that historians may address thirty years from now with regard to US presidents using President Obama as a case study.

It's pretty much agreed that the president has checked out of day-to-day world events, concentrating more on golf and fund-raisers. (Their analysis, not mine.)

There is a "feeling"among some that the president realizes that he does not have much leverage at this point. He has no strategy for Syria (his words, not mine), and Putin says he can take Kiev in two weeks and Obama has no military plans for Ukraine (his words, not mine). In response, he phones it in, or ignores it completely.

My interest is pretty much energy-related, and Bakken-centered. I doubt the US has ever been in a better position, compared to the rest of the world, with regard to energy. We have it all: nuclear, thermal, hydroelectric, solar, wind, biomass, ethanol, coal, natural gas, oil, and yet, I don't recall the president talking about US energy policy except to say a long time ago, something about "all of the above." Except coal. And no Canadian oil. From my perspective, he has failed to use North American energy as leverage to frame world events going forward, not just one or two years into the future, but decades into the future.

It appears that the president has "interpreted" his loss of leverage (a lame duck president with looming mid-term elections, and a White House strategy to keep him out of toss-up states [their words, not mine]) to affect his legacy as a loss of leverage for the US to affect / frame global events. In psychiatry that is called "transference."

He appears to see the future of the United States what he sees in his own personal future. I doubt this is unique for this president.

The phenomenon was noted in Jimmy Carter's "malaise speech."

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Disengaged

The Washington Post:

Obama has been giving Americans a pep talk, essentially counseling them not to let international turmoil get in the way of the domestic economic recovery. “The world has always been messy,” he said Friday. “In part, we’re just noticing now because of social media and our capacity to see in intimate detail the hardships that people are going through.”

So we wouldn’t have fussed over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine if not for Facebook? Or worried about terrorists taking over much of Syria and Iraq if not for Twitter? This explanation, following Obama’s indiscrete admission Thursday that “we don’t have a strategy yet” for military action against ISIS, adds to the impression that Obama is disengaged.

Wow, The Washington Post no less.