Energy Transfer-Sunoco JV Forms Monster Permian Network

The day after closing a $3.18 billion acquisition of WTG Midstream Holdings, Energy Transfer (ET) added another piece to its Permian Basin footprint in a joint venture agreement with Sunoco.

The agreement, unveiled by the companies on July 15, combines the companies’ Permian crude gathering assets, including ET adding its produced water assets.

The JV allows Energy Transfer to drive more products to its network while expanding Sunoco’s operational experience, Ajay Bakshani, director of analytics at East Daley Analytics, told Hart Energy via email. Sunoco is an affiliate of Energy Transfer.

“Sunoco’s (SUN) contribution to the JV is primarily via its NuStar (NS) acquisition,” Bakshani said.

In May, Sunoco closed the acquisition of NuStar for $7.3 billion. NuStar owned a gathering system with a capacity near 550,000 bbl/d in the Midland Basin, which generated about $250 million in EBITDA annually, according to East Daley.

Sunoco, which has traditionally functioned as a fuel distribution company, can lean on ET’s midstream experience in the region.

“After the NuStar acquisition was announced, many in the market were wondering if the next step would be for Sunoco to contribute some of the crude oil pipeline assets of NuStar to Energy Transfer,” CBRE analyst Hines Howard told Hart Energy. “Instead, this joint venture situation seems to effectively transfer operatorship of the assets to Energy Transfer without having Energy Transfer acquire them outright.”

Under the JV, which has an effective date of July 1, Energy Transfer holds a 67.5% interest in the partnership while Sunoco has a 32.5% interest. ET will operate the network.

Energy Transfer benefits from adding a strong gathering system from the Midland Basin to its profile, although the company may have some difficulty adding the volumes from its new gathering system onto its crude pipelines that ship out of the region.

“Although it is harder to vertically integrate and push gathering volumes onto a company’s long-haul pipelines for crude than it is for NGLs, those opportunities still exist,” Bakshani said, noting that other midstream companies have been able to do so. “We have seen Plains (PAA) [Plains All American] do this with their Oryx JV: the increased strength in Permian crude gathering has kept their Permian-TX Gulf Coast pipelines relatively full.”

In 2021, PAA and Oryx Midstream created a JV that merged most of the companies’ Permian assets.

Sunoco did not have any egress pipelines in its Permian network, and Energy Transfer did not include its long-haul systems in the JV. Bakshani said that the NuStar system delivers into the egress lines of several ET competitors.

With the Sunoco partnership, ET may drive more of the crude volumes onto its West Texas Gulf or Permian Express pipelines, thereby increasing its EBITDA.

Energy Transfer currently owns 1.3 MMbbl/d of Permian Basin crude egress capacity, about 16% of the total.