Enterprise Products Partners began receiving natural gas shipments into its Rio Blanco County, Colo., Central Treating Facility. The facility, which is dedicated to ExxonMobil’s Piceance basin holdings, is located eight miles south of Enterprise’s Meeker gas processing facility.

The Central Treating Facility has a capacity of 200 million cubic feet per day (cf/d), which is double what ExxonMobil is currently producing in the play. The plant is designed to remove impurities before shipping volumes to the Meeker plant.

The facility is a major part of Enterprise and ExxonMobil’s 30-year midstream services agreement in the Piceance.

“We are very pleased to work with ExxonMobil to build this facility, which was completed ahead of schedule and on budget,” said Michael Creel, president and chief executive officer of Enterprise.

“The facility provides the necessary services to support ExxonMobil’s Piceance Project, its largest, land-based drilling program in North America. This initiative complements our recently completed Meeker II expansion, which doubles natural gas processing capacity of the complex,” he said.

The Meeker II expansion was completed in March and increased processing capacity of the facility to 1.5 billion cf/d. The expansion allows the facility to extract up 70,000 b/d, making it the company’s largest processing plant (see Gas Processors Report 03/18/09).