Enbridge's Pony Express Acquisition Update -- September 16, 2026

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RBN Energy: Enbridge saddles up for expanded crude service with Pony Express acquisition. Link here.  

Enbridge is buying Tallgrass Energy’s crude oil transportation, gathering and storage business for US$2.55 billion in cash. The deal includes a 75% interest in the 1,050-mile Pony Express Pipeline, a roughly 460-Mb/d crude oil system linking Rockies production with the Cushing, OK, storage hub and providing direct access to about 500 Mb/d of refining capacity. Enbridge also gets a 51% interest in the Powder River Gateway system, about 8.4 MMbbl of storage capacity across nine crude terminals, and Stanchion Energy, a crude marketing business. In today’s RBN blog, we discuss what the acquisition means for Enbridge.

First, some background on Tallgrass Energy, a midstream company formed in 2012 and based in Leawood, KS, initially focused on natural-gas transportation. It entered the crude business following its August 2012 purchase of about 432 miles of the existing Pony Express Pipeline (pink line in Figure 1 below) from Kinder Morgan Interstate Gas Transmission. The line had originally been a crude-oil pipeline but was converted to natural-gas service in the mid-1990s. After receiving Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) authorization in September 2013, Tallgrass abandoned the line’s natural-gas service in December 2013 and converted it back to crude-oil service. It also constructed approximately 260 miles of new pipeline from Lincoln County, KS, south to Cushing, creating the original Guernsey-to-Cushing mainline, which entered commercial service in October 2014.

Figure 1. Tallgrass’s Crude Oil Assets Included in Enbridge Deal. Source: Novi Labs

Pony Express receives crude at the Guernsey, WY, hub from the Powder River Basin — including volumes delivered via the Powder River Gateway System’s Iron Horse and Powder River Express pipelines (more on those below), as well as from the Bakken. The initial Pony Express system established a Rockies-to-Cushing crude oil route, with deliveries also available to the Phillips 66 refinery (blue refinery icon) in Ponca City, OK. The Northeast Colorado Lateral entered commercial service in April 2015, adding supply access from northeastern Colorado. The 55-mile Platteville Extension, which connected a new origin near Platteville, CO, to the Pony Express system, entered service in Q2 2018.