Locator: 49389B.
Economy: I may be interpreting this incorrectly but this seems like good economic news. Link here. This doesn't look like an economy teetering on recession.
Let's put the October, 2025, Empire Manufacturing Index in bullet form:
- EMI: +10.7% vs a minus 1.8% estimate -- holy mackerel! Prior was a minus 8.7%.
- new orders: +3.7% vs a minus 19.6 prior -- holy mackerel!
- shipments: +14.4% vs a minus 17.3 prior -- another holy .... well, you get the picture!
- prices paid: +52.4 vs +46.1 prior
- prices received: +27.2 vs +21.6 prior
- employment: +6.2 vs a minus 1.2 prior -- wow.
Banks: blowing away earnings.
- Morgan Stanley's profits surged a whopping 45%, reinforcing what looks to be a robust 3Q25 for big banks
- net income: $4.6 billion
- BofA: profits surged 23%
- net income: $8.5 billion
- both figures were more than $1 billion higher than what analysts saw coming
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Back to the Bakken
WTI: $58.95
New wells: link here.
RBN Energy: link here.
Today, early release:
ARM Energy Holdings has reached a final investment decision (FID) for the 2.5-Bcf/d Mustang Express Pipeline, which will support Sempra Infrastructure’s Port Arthur LNG Phase 2, the latest of several major LNG projects in the Sabine River area to reach FID. The pipeline is intended to act as a regional header system with a route designed to offer maximum optionality and connectivity. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll discuss the pipeline’s strategy and what it could mean for regional gas flows.
Let’s start with the biggest story in the gas market. The surge in associated gas production from the crude-oil-focused Permian Basin has prompted a wave of new pipelines to move gas to major demand centers, especially existing and planned LNG export terminals along the Texas and Southwest Louisiana coast. The 2.5-Bcf/d Matterhorn Express came online in October 2024 to take gas from the Permian to the Katy Hub just west of Houston; so will the 2.5-Bcf/d Eiger Express when it starts up in 2028. Also planned are the 2.5-Bcf/d Blackcomb Pipeline from the Permian to near Corpus Christi, the 2.2-Bcf/d Hugh Brinson Pipeline to near Dallas, and a handful of new pipes along the coast, including the Traverse and Trident projects. (For insights on gas flows throughout Texas and Louisiana, check out RBN’s Arrow Model.)
The latest entry, ARM Energy Holdings’ 236-mile, 42-inch Mustang Express (dashed blue line segments in Figure 1 below), would play a pivotal role in moving Permian gas to the coast because it would run from Colorado County, where it connects to the header system for the Tres Palacios storage facility (green line), to the Katy Hub and then to Port Arthur Phase 2 (red-striped diamond) on the easternmost edge of Texas’s Gulf Coast (more on the route below). Port Arthur Phase 2, which was sanctioned in September, will include two liquefaction trains, each at 6.5 MMtpa (about 1 Bcf/d), bringing the site’s total capacity to about 26 MMtpa (3.8 Bcf/d). It is expected to start up in two stages: the first train in 2030 and the second in 2031.
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Reminder
Kinder Morgan’s Options for Moving Bakken NGLs to Conway and the Gulf Coast
Kinder Morgan’s ongoing conversion of the Double H Pipeline to NGL service is only part of a larger plan by the midstream giant to move significant volumes of Bakken-sourced Y-grade from western North Dakota to fractionation centers in Kansas and the Texas Gulf Coast. The Double H, which until recently transported crude oil, runs only to eastern Wyoming, so how will NGLs on the pipeline — renamed Hiland Express — get from there to Conway, KS; Mont Belvieu, TX; and maybe Sweeny, TX, too? In today’s RBN blog, we discuss the likely flow paths for southbound Y-grade on Hiland Express, a new NGL takeaway alternative for Bakken gas processors.
First, some background. As we said a while back in Take It To The Limit, crude-oil-focused wells in the Bakken generate large volumes of NGL-packed associated gas that need to be processed. There are five main ways to move NGLs out of the Bakken: (1) moving mixed NGLs south to Conway on ONEOK’s Elk Creek and Bakken NGL pipelines (purple and dark-pink lines, respectively, in Figure 1 below); (2) piping ethane north to Canada on Pembina’s Vantage Pipeline (light-orange line); (3) trucking or railing out so-called C3+ NGLs (propane, butanes and pentanes) — ethane can’t be transported that way; (4) entraining mixed NGLs within “wet” gas on Pembina’s Alliance pipeline (red line) to the Chicago area (where the NGLs are separated via fractionation); and (5) rejecting ethane into gas on the Northern Border pipeline (dark-blue line).
Figure 1. Selected Pipelines Out of the Bakken. Source: RBN
The four pipeline options have been close to maxed out for a while now and C3+ by rail is a strategy for some but an expensive last resort for others. The Bakken’s NGL takeaway constraints in January 2024 led ONEOK to announce a 135-Mb/d expansion to its 20-inch-diameter, 300-Mb/d Elk Creek pipeline; that project was completed this past spring. (The capacity of ONEOK’s 12-inch Bakken NGL Pipeline to northeastern Colorado is 140 Mb/d.)
