A year after clearing ground on eastern Ohio’s Kensington cryogenic processing plant and the Harrison Hub natural gas liquids (NGL) storage complex, M3 Midstream proudly showed off before-and-after photos of the sister projects to industry peers.

Frank Tsuru, president and chief executive of M3 Midstream, recently offered an update on the status of the fully integrated midstream service complex, which came about in 2012 as a result of a joint venture (JV) agreement among M3, Access Midstream and EV Energy Partners, a partnership known as the Utica East Ohio Buckeye.

The midstream system is geographically situated right in the middle of the region’s rich gas fairway, he said at Hart Energy’s recent Marcellus-Utica Midstream Conference.

“Currently, there are nine drilling wells there dedicated to the system,” Tsuru continued. “We expect 200 wells to be connected to this system in 2014.”

Still in various phases of construction, the Kensington plant in Columbiana County and a second cryogenic processing plant, the Leesville in Carroll County, have 400 million cubic feet (MMcf) per day of capacity in-service now, with 800 MMcf per day planned eventually.

“We’re just really thrilled with the performance of these plants,” Tsuru said. “When we say there is 800 million a day of
sanctioned or processing under construction, it’s more like a Bcf of total capacity. So, we’re really pushing these plants, and they’re performing well.” UEO Buckeye has been working hard to increase propane recovery at the Kensington plant, Tsuru said.

“We actually maintained full rejection of ethane, and we managed to recover mid-80% of propane,” he said. “Now that’s quite significant because every single point, every on point of propane recovered for a 200 million a day cryogenic processing plant equals one rail car, about 700 bbl. of propane.”

Expectations are that the plants under ethane recovery will realize ethane recovery of about 92% and propane recovery of 99%.

“We’re very excited about that, as are our producers, our customers,” Tsuru said.

The processed liquids out of the Kensington and Leesville plants are being transported, he said, via a 12-inch line to the
Harrison Hub fractionation complex in northern Harrison County.

“As we were building Kensington at breakneck speed, obviously, our fractionation facility had to maintain that same speed,” Tsuru said. Despite the speedy construction of the massive complex of 600 acres that sits alongside the Ohio Central Railroad system, he added, “we were able to put together a heck of a facility.”

“At the Harrison complex, we have 135,000 bbl. of C2+ fractionation under construction,” Tsuru said. “We have 45,000 bbl. in-service right now, with another 45,000 to be put in-service in the second quarter.”

In addition, the UEO Buckeye partners believed it was very important to install a significant amount of operational storage—900,000 bbl.—at the Harrison Hub, he said. “We felt a large operational storage volume would give us, No. 1, a much more reliable plant, and No. 2, it would provide greater netbacks to our customers.”

Regarding the rail terminal at the hub, there are about nine linear miles of track, allowing for storage for about 750 rail cars, Tsuru said. “We can load upward of 100 C3+ cars per day,” he said. “We’ll be building a condensate loading facility that will allow us to load 100-car unit loads at a time.”