Texas will soon begin construction on a major natural gas pipeline that will stretch across the state, aiming to ease pressure on one of the country’s most important energy corridors.
Principals WhiteWater Midstream, OEOK, and MPLX (a Marathon Petroleum subsidiary), announced this that the Eiger Express Pipeline will span 450 miles from the Permian Basin in West Texas to the Katy area near Houston. Once complete, it will be capable of moving up to 2.5 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day through a 42-inch-diameter line.
The pipeline comes as Permian output faces infrastructure bottlenecks.
A 2023 Bloomberg report warned that pipelines connecting the basin to Corpus Christi were nearing capacity, “threatening to cap U.S. oil exports at a time when the world needs more.”
Despite this, outflow to Houston has grown since 2020 thanks to new lines like Enterprise’s M2E3 and the Wink to Webster pipeline.
The Eiger Express follows the completion of the Matterhorn Express, which is another WhiteWater Midstream-led project in partnership with MPLX, ONEOK, and Devon Energy.
The Matterhorn Express has already relieved some pressure in the region.
“Matterhorn has freed up space, and the price we are getting for gas now has been positive for almost a month,” Tall City Exploration CEO Mike Oestmann told Reuters last fall. “We produced a lot of gas that we not only didn’t get paid for, we paid for it to be taken away.”
The companies behind the Eiger Express Pipeline say it will improve reliability and expand access to Gulf Coast export hubs. Pending regulatory approvals, it is expected to be operational by mid-2028.
Though the Eiger Express Pipeline is smaller than the Rockies Express pipeline, which runs 1,679 miles from Colorado to Ohio, it is designed to play a pivotal role in ensuring the flow of energy from West Texas reaches global markets.
