FORT WORTH, Texas — As tariff deadlines loomed closer, Energy Transfer (ET) kept getting mixed signals from its shippers.

“It was all kind of ramping up, and the ship would be at the dock and you'd start to load and, all of a sudden, they'd say, ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, stop. Don't load,’” said Tom Long, co-CEO of Energy Transfer.

“So you would, and then, all of a sudden, they'd come back a little bit later and say, ‘No, no, no, go ahead and load.’”

Midstream company Energy Transfer had an up close-and-personal view of the trade war with China, which got a 90-day reprieve on May 12. Long spoke on the current state of his company at Hart Energy’s SUPER DUG Conference & Expo on May 14.

Prior to the ceasefire, Energy Transfer had a key role to play in the one commodity China did not tariff. On April 29, several news sites reported that China would not slap a 125% tariff on ethane, one of the primary NGLs produced in the U.S.

Ethane is key in the manufacture of ethylene, a key ingredient for plastic, among other industrial materials. It was the one commodity China considered essential enough that the country allowed it to be imported in from the U.S. during the height of trading tensions.

There are two U.S. companies that export ethane to China, Enterprise Products Partners and Energy Transfer.

Long said that, following a brief period of uncertainty, ET’s ethane exports continued to flow.

“It was interesting times, but the beauty of it is that we never slowed down other than that little bit of a very short time,” Long said. “The ethane is just so critical to China, to keep running all the massive petrochemical plants, the crackers and everything else they've built over there.”

Energy Transfer has focused on ethane specifically and NGLs in general for development. The majority of builds on the midstream company’s project webpage focus on increasing the company’s ability to exploit the chemicals.

The company used to focus on getting as much value out of natural gas, but started moving into NGL exploitation about 15 years ago with asset purchases in Nederland and Mont Belvieu in Texas.

The company’s NGL investments have made sense, considering ET already had many of the pieces in place. Meanwhile, worldwide demand for NGLs has seen steady growth that remained stable even in 2024, when natural gas prices suffered low prices thanks to an oversupply.

“When you start piecing all this together, you see what we've got on the midstream side of it and on the intrastate transportation side, but then we can keep those liquids in our system and start fractionating them,” Long said. The company has built “fractionator after fractionator” and now has a capacity of more than 1.1 MMbbl/d of NGLs.

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