SAN ANTONIO—The midstream’s leading advocacy group has evolved and added multiple roles in its 95-year history to meet the needs of its members. Today, that means a focus on regulatory matters.

Mark Sutton, president and CEO of the GPA Midstream Association, told attendees at Hart Energy’s 2nd annual Midstream Texas conference that the association now stands as “the only trade group that advocates for a midstream position” with the federal and state governments in major producing regions. “Our biggest issues are with federal regulation and legislation,” he said, adding state government issues also have grown in importance.

Hart Energy’s Midstream Business magazine serves as GPA Midstream’s official publication.

A changing—and frequently hostile—regulatory environment caused the Tulsa, Okla.-based organization to change its mission statement in 2009 to reflect its broadened role that builds on its work as primarily a technical and educational body. It changed its name earlier this year from the Gas Processors Association to emphasize that it speaks for all of the midstream, not just its traditional membership of gas processors.

Those changes fit with the organization’s evolving mission since its founding in 1921, Sutton noted. Back then, gas processing was a new and uncertain business producing what was referred to as casinghead gas or natural gasoline—or NGL.

“The major manufacturers had little or no idea what they were selling because there was no consistency in the industry,” Sutton said. “It was despised by the railroads and the customers in the early days and was responsible for many deaths. The constituents were inconsistent and the heat of the day would heat up the rail cars, they would blow up and kill people.

“It was being sold, when they could sell it, at huge discounts,” he added.

Thus the Association of Natural Gasoline Manufacturers was organized to “put the industry’s house in order by doing several things,” according to Sutton. First, it had to set specifications for the industry’s gas liquids products, then devise test methods to confirm specifications for those products to assure their safety.

That was the foundation of GPA’s continuing technical and research emphasis. Its standards—among many—for defining product specifications for propane and butanes, the physical properties of various hydrocarbons and the heating value at custody transfer for natural gas today serve as benchmarks for the worldwide oil and gas industry.

From writing technical specifications, the new organization went on to develop standardized business contracts and became involved in patent litigation—an important role as the new industry evolved and expanded.

“Since that stressful and humble beginning, GPA has been involved in technologically shaping this industry,” he noted. GPA continues to sponsor research projects that return 10 times the value of the cost of that research, Sutton said. Training and education, covering such topics as compression and pipeline integrity, are other important roles GPA has taken on over the years.

But if many of the technical and operating questions of the midstream have been answered, the biggest challenge today for the sector lies in advocacy during the government regulatory process, he stressed.

“We are positioning to assure that the midstream remains strong,” Sutton emphasized. The mission-statement change and name change “allow us to advocate with a true midstream focus… it has become our core mission to advocate for the midstream.”

In 2014 and 2015, GPA’s leadership developed what Sutton called “an advocacy package” that would allow it to add a new and greater role with government. That package included a 35% dues increase to fund hiring of a full-time vice president of government affairs in Washington, D.C.; a full-time director of state government affairs to monitor regulator matters in 11 key states; and the creation of a political action committee (PAC) operated in cooperation with GPA’s joint GPSA Midstream Suppliers organization.

“If you don’t have a PAC, it’s hard to play the game today in Washington, D.C.,” Sutton added.

The association has had a significant increase in the number of formal letters and comments to regulatory agencies, he noted. In 2014, GPA filed 13 comments. Last year, that number rose to 41 and to date in 2016 it has presented 26 formal comments.

“Of those 26, four to five were a considerable undertaking, comments on methane regulation, which is really killing us all in this industry,” Sutton said, noting some of GPA’s filings ran to 50 or more pages. Safety regulation also has been an area it monitors closely.

“Depending on which administration is elected, I don’t see [regulatory issues] changing a whole lot,” Sutton said of GPA’s role in the process. He noted the Obama administration has attempted to mandate many of its energy related policies, generally opposed by the oil and gas industry as onerous, through regulatory mandates published before the current administration leaves office in January.

“It has been a tough fight” in recent months as a result, he said, and the midstream will need to stay involved in the foreseeable future.

Paul Hart can be reached at pdhart@hartenergy.com.