Great Comment From An Amtrak Traveler Through the Bakken

This was sent to me as a comment. It's too good to be missed by those who might not read the comments.

Last month, ONEOK announced capital spending of over $100 mill on natural gas collection lines in Divide County. The intended gas plant for Divide County gas is Stateline II. 

With Hess's large expansion of their Tioga Plant, the new Plains All American Plant near Ross, the Whiting/MDU plant north of Belfield, there remains big areas of the oil patch that don't have easy access to a plant. Most of the pre-2006 gas plants are tiny - even the new Whiting / MDU plant is relatively small at 35 mill ft3/day. 

Dunn, Divide, Stark, and the Fort Berthold reservation all have limited natural gas processing. Typically, a natural gas plant needs rail access for produced NGLs or a NGL pipeline. What's interesting is that Garden Creek I and II don't have rail access in McKenzie County, so the profitablity of those plants are highly dependent on the NGL pipeline that is proposed through Wyoming. Once that pipeline is built, locating in natural gas plants in areas without rail becomes much more profitable. 

Recently passed through the Bakken on Amtrak. Noticed a lot of natural gas liquids moving through the rail system from the Hess plant. With the volumes of propane and butane generated in these plants, unit trains seen for oil aren't really feasible. Once the ONEOK NGL and oil pipelines are built, ONEOK profits should increase substantially. 

Going through Mountrail and Williams County on Amtrak, one could just feel the "energy." Seemed like rail construction was going on everywhere. Fracking sand, open cars of piping, natural gas liquid cars, and oil unit trains seemed to be passed continuously where there were double tracks. Oil pipelines to loading facilities and nat gas lines seemed to going in at a number of locales.