Pembina Pipeline To Buy Veresen Inc -- North Dakota Story -- May 1, 2017

If one does a "Pembina Pipeline" search on the blog, one finds many, many posts mentioning Pembina Pipeline. It is a big player in the Bakken.

Let's begin with this post, though, from November 8, 2013: the ten fastest growing energy companies in North America:

• Pacific Rubiales Energy Corp - Canada
• Pembina Pipeline Corp - Canada
• HollyFrontier Corp - Texas
• CLR - Oklahoma
• Concho Resources - Texas
• Energy Transfer Equity, LP - Texas
• EOG Resources, Inc - Texas
• Denbury Resources Inc - Texas
• Crescent Point Energy Corp - Canada
• Buckeye Partners, LP - Texas

Pembina Pipeline is a huge transporter of ethane from the Bakken, specifically from Tioga, to western Canadian oil sands where it is used as a diluent to transport heavy oil sands crude oil. Doing a blog search for Pembina Pipeline will provide quite a bit of information.

I say all that because a reader sent me this link: Pembina Pipeline is buying smaller rival Veresen Inc for almost $10 billion, including debt, giving Pembina access to natural gas pipelines and processing infrastructure. The combined company will have a strong position in the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin, home to the world’s third largest crude reserves.

This deal follows two other recent huge deals in the pipeline sector:

• Enbridge buys Spectra, previously blogged, for almost $30 billion
• TransCanada buys Columbia Pipeline Group, for about $10 billion

Veresen's network stretches across Alberta, British Columbia, Saskatchewan, and North Dakota. In addition, Veresen has a 680-mile natural gas pipeline extending from Wyoming to Oregon, and owns the Albert Ethane Gathering System.

There are several story lines here.

Much more at the link.

It is interesting that Enbridge did not make the top-10 list in 2013.

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Word For The Day: Tsundoku

The Japanese have a word for one who collects too many books: 

The desire to buy more books than you can physically read in one human lifetime is actually so universal, there’s a specific word for it: tsundoku. Defined as the stockpiling of books that will never be consumed, the term is a Japanese portmanteau of sorts, combining the words “tsunde” (meaning “to stack things”), “oku” (meaning “to leave for a while”) and “doku” (meaning “to read”).

One wonders if "tsunami" and "tsundou" have the same root word, or similar etymology. I know that being crushed under my bookcases, should they fall, would be similar to being crushed by a tsunami.