ONEOK Partners To Invest Upto $780 Mln For Williston Basin Projects

(RTTNews) - ONEOK Partners, L.P. (OKS) said Tuesday it plans to invest about $650 million to $780 million between now and the second quarter 2016, mainly to build a new 200-million cubic feet per day natural gas processing facility - the Lonesome Creek plant - and related infrastructure in McKenzie County, N.D., in the Bakken Shale in the Williston Basin.

It also plans to complete a second expansion of the Bakken NGL Pipeline, which will increase the pipeline's capacity to 160,000 barrels per day (bpd) from 135,000 bpd.

The new Lonesome Creek plant is expected to cost about $320 million to $390 million. When complete, the new plant will be the partnership's largest natural gas processing plant in North Dakota and will increase the partnership's total natural gas processing capacity in the state to approximately 800 MMcf/d.

The Lonesome Creek plant is the partnership's sixth new natural gas processing plant built in the region since 2010 and seventh plant overall.

ONEOK Partners also expects to invest about $230 million to $290 million for related expansions and upgrades to its existing natural gas gathering and compression infrastructure.

The Lonesome Creek plant and related infrastructure are expected to be completed by the end of 2015 and will be supported by acreage dedications from producers.

To accommodate NGL volumes produced from the new Lonesome Creek plant, ONEOK Partners expects to invest an additional $100 million to increase capacity on its Bakken NGL Pipeline.

This second expansion of the Bakken NGL Pipeline, which is expected to be complete during the first half of 2016, will increase its capacity to 160,000 bpd to accommodate NGL volumes from the new Lonesome Creek plant.

The Bakken NGL Pipeline is currently being expanded to 135,000 bpd from an original capacity of 60,000 bpd. This previously announced initial expansion is expected to be complete in the third quarter 2014.

The partnership has announced total investments of about $6 billion to $6.4 billion through 2016 for acquisitions and infrastructure growth projects related to natural gas gathering and processing, and natural gas liquids, which includes the projects described above.