US DCP to build natgas processing plants in Colorado

HOUSTON (ICIS)–DCP Midstream plans to build another natural-gas processing plant in the Denver-Julesburg (DJ) basin in Colorado, the US-based midstream company said on Monday.

The plant will be called O’Connor 2, and it will have a capacity of 200m cubic feet/day (mcf/day). It will be the 11th plant that DCP has in the DJ basin, the company said. The O’Connor 2 plant and its associated gathering infrastructure should be in service in 2019 at a cost of $350m-400m.

Meanwhile, the Mewbourn 3 plant is under construction. It will also have a capacity of 200mcf/day, DCP said. It should start up in the fourth quarter of 2018 and cost $395m.

Earlier in the second quarter, DCP increased its processing capacity in the DJ basin by up to 40mcf/day by adding more field compression and plant-bypass infrastructure, it said.

By 2019, DCP said its natural-gas processing capacity in the DJ basin should reach 1.2bn cubic feet/day (bcf/day).

Natural-gas processing plants are important to the petrochemical industry because they extract natural-gas liquids (NGLs) from the natural-gas stream. These are later separated into ethane and other feedstock used by crackers.