Hart Energy’s Jessica Morales discussed the outlook for public midstream companies in the stock market at the Marcellus-Utica Midstream conference in January in Pittsburgh with Tara Dziedzoc, head of BD Global Listings, New York Stock Exchange; and Welles Fitzpatrick, managing director, equity research, at SunTrust Robinson Humphrey.

Their outlook was positive.

“When you look at the pipeline—pun intended—of companies coming to market, we have a lot of confidential filers, which is great,” Dziedzoc said. “The Jobs Act in 2012 really encouraged companies to test the waters and do confidential filings to see if their companies are IPO-ready. We’re really happy to see a nice backlog of companies across the energy sector.”

Fitzpatrick noted how investors have shown an eagerness to jump back into the market.

“Obviously, we’ve had a hard three years since mid-’14 with the drawdown in commodity prices, both oil and gas, but with the recovery you’ve seen people come back into the space,” he said. “You’ve seen a pretty robust acceptance of some of these IPOs trading very well in the after-market.”