Chris Akers, president and COO of Eureka Midstream, talked to Jessica Morales about how midstream operators, not just those in the upstream, are carving out efficiencies in the Marcellus-Utica region.

“By drilling multiple wells on a pad, they [producers] obviously get the efficiencies on the drilling and the fracking side, but we get the efficiencies by doing one large pipeline out of the pad vs. doing three pipelines to smaller pads,” he said at Hart Energy’s Marcellus-Utica Midstream conference in Pittsburgh in January. “The advantage it has is less risk on the environment—one pipeline vs. three. And it’s much cheaper for us to do that on the pipeline side.”

Eureka operates gas-gathering systems in the Marcellus-Utica region with a capacity of 3 billion cubic feet per day.