Piñon Midstream LLC has made expansions to its sour natural gas treating and carbon capture plant in Lea County, New Mexico (Dark Horse).
Dark Horse provides a purpose-built, sour natural gas treating and carbon capture solution for oil and natural gas producers operating in the Delaware basin. It captures and sequesters carbon dioxide (CO2) and hydrogen sulfide (H2S), with over 100,000 metric tons of CO2 and H2S sequestered to date. The infrastructure includes two 400 gpm amine treating units, two 18,000-ft-deep AGI wells, about 50,000 horsepower of NACE-compliant compression, and about 35 miles of high-pressure gathering and redelivery pipelines.
The company placed its second acid gas injection (ACI) well, Independence AGI #2, into service in April 2023. The second well allows for an increased treated capacity of up to 20 MMcfd, which is sufficient to accommodate up to 500 MMcfd of treating capacity at Dark Horse, the company said (OGJ Online, Oct. 13, 2021).
Additionally, the well ensures full operational redundancy, ensuring high runtimes while minimizing flaring, it continued.
The company is increasing the sour gas treating capacity of Dark Horse by about 50%, to about 270 MMcfd, with the addition of Train III. Construction is expected to begin in this year’s third quarter, with a planned in-service date of January 2024. Piñon has initiated engineering work for Train IV.
Piñon currently operates four NACE-compliant compressor stations with about 200 MMcfd of total compression capacity. Additionally, two compressor stations will be placed into service in 2024, bringing Piñon's total compression capacity to 350 MMcfd.
Piñon’s gathering and treating system includes the Grande sweet gas redelivery pipeline, consisting of 22 miles of high-pressure, 20-in OD steel pipe connecting Dark Horse with four existing regional processers. Piñon is evaluating other interconnects with third-party processors.
Piñon now provides solutions that enable customers to source sweet natural gas directly from the Grande pipeline system for gas lift operations.