The midstream’s job today amounts to nothing less than “repiping North America,” according to a wide-ranging midstream panel discussion featured at the INGAA Foundation’s 2014 annual meeting.

Mike McGonagill, senior vice president and COO for Alliance Pipeline, served as panel moderator and made that observation as he opened the panel session. “Things have totally changed in this business” from a few years ago, he added, before multiple unconventional plays changed the future of North America’s energy business.

Joining McGonagill were Tony Chovanec, senior vice president, fundamentals and supply, Enterprise Products Partners LP; Greg Floerke, senior vice president, northeast region, MarkWest Energy Partners LP; and Chris Humes, vice president of operations, Crestwood Midstream Partners LP.

Chovanec observed that in addition to diverse growth demands, the midstream itself is a diverse business with multiple, interlocking functions. “The midstream is hard to describe—we don’t all look alike,” he told the conference, held in Dana Point, Calif.

Growth is the big midstream story now, he added, pointing out Enterprise alone has built or converted the use of some 6,000 miles of pipe in the last six years, focusing on NGL and crude oil systems. The firm’s current projects include an ethane-only system around the Gulf Coast that will supply the growing petrochemical capacity of that region. “That’s all about demand,” he said of the ethane system, noting growing ethane demand caused Enterprise to have to move from batch ethane movements to the new, dedicated system.

“At Enterprise, we spend as much time on the demand side of the equation as we do the supply side of the equation,” he added. “And make no mistake, gas is very well supplied.”

The firm’s buildout will help meet the growing demand for U.S. exports moving abroad from the Gulf Coast. “We are already the largest exporter of propane in the world,” Chovanec pointed out, in addition to the firm’s construction of one of the first ethane-export terminals in the world at Morgan’s Point on the Houston Ship Channel—as well as its much-publicized processed condensate exports, which started in the third quarter. Morgan’s Point is scheduled to open in the third quarter of 2016 and will have a capacity of 200,000 barrels per day (bbl/d).

On the supply side, he noted the firm has a staff of geologists and petroleum engineers to monitor where production will come from “and they have helped us make investment decisions over the years.”

Floerke focused on a region that may see the greatest midstream change of any right now—the Northeast. MarkWest’s assets are at the center of the Marcellus-Utica production region and, as a result it has become a keen observer of the region’s upstream and midstream trends.

“We do gather, we do compress, but the heart of our business is processing, that’s cryogenic to remove the gas from the liquids stream, then fractionation to break the liquids down into its pieces,” he explained, noting MarkWest assets were in place before the shale boom.

“Coal was king in the area when we started and there was some associated gas with that production,” Floerke said, noting a much smaller MarkWest had gathering and processing assets in place when the shale plays “were barely being talked about.”

Since that time, the region has seen “exponential” growth in production and the accompanying midstream capacity required to gather, process and transport it. MarkWest alone now has 2.5 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) of gas processing capacity in the Marcellus, generating some 200,000 bbl/d of NGL output, he said. It has a smaller footprint in the nearby Utica but capacity there has grown rapidly, nearing 1 Bcf/d.

Following on Chovanec’s comments about ethane demand, Floerke noted that some 55% of NGL supply in the region is ethane, which must find a market “and the economics for ethane recovery are not very good right now,” he said. “The ability to blend an ethane-rich gas stream is becoming tougher and tougher” for residue gas pipelines. Such ethane-focused pipelines as ATEX and Mariner West are midstream’s response to that supply-demand imbalance.

But ethane is not a strictly midstream issue, Floerke said, adding “the issue goes back to the well pad and will become the controlling factor” in future growth of the Marcellus and Utica plays, he predicted.

Humes discussed the diverse regional operations of Crestwood, which has assets from coast to coast. Crestwood has functions in two operating groups, natural gas and crude oil-NGL, that operate in four geographic regions, Northeast, Central, Rocky Mountain and California.

He added the firm operates in the four major functions of the midstream value chain: gathering, processing, transportation and storage. Its regulated gas group transports some 2.1 Bcf/d and its unregulated, gathering network moves approximately 2.5 Bcf/d and cryogenically processes 600 million cubic feet per day.

“We’re trying to grow organically or with bolt-on acquisitions” in the current robust midstream business, Humes added. Even though geographically diverse, Crestwood sees the Northeast “as one of our biggest growth areas” as the Marcellus and Utica develop and require new transportation capacity— a region he called “the most prolific natural gas play in history.”

He said the firm projects the region to be producing 20 Bcf/d by 2020 with some 1 million barrels per day of NGL. “And it just takes a long time to get a piece of pipe permitted up there,” he added, making the necessary midstream buildout more difficult.

In contrast to the gas-related supply and demand issues in the Northeast, Crestwood is responding to primarily oil- and liquids-related capacity demand in the Bakken and Niobrara. It is, however, adding a new 200 MMcf/d processing plant serving Niobrara productions in Wyoming.

Its projection for the central region, covering the Barnett and Fayetteville plays, is for production to remain flat in the near future. Crestwood is adding new gas processing capacity on the New Mexico side of the Permian Basin. To the north, it’s adding capacity in the Granite Wash in the Texas Panhandle.