Just days into 2025 and new midstream deals are already plotting the script for a year of action to move and export more natural gas and NGL. Reese Energy Consulting today starts with the latest news from Houston-based refiner Phillips 66, which in mid-December wrapped up its $3 billion asset divestiture plan and prepared to pounce with more NGL and midstream ambitions in the Permian.

You might recall Phillips last May picked up Pinnacle Midstream’s gas gathering and processing assets in the Midland for $550 million—a strategic chess move that expanded its midstream NGL wellhead-to-market business and set the stage for bigger things to come. Phillips will now acquire EPIC’s NGL midstream business for $2.2 billion. The all-cash deal includes two 170 MBPD fractionators near Corpus Christi and 350 miles of purity distribution pipe. But the real jewel of this handshake may well be EPIC’s 885-mile NGL pipeline, which connects processing plants in the Midland, Delaware, and Eagle Ford to Texas Gulf Coast fractionation complexes and the Phillips 66 Sweeny Hub.

Meanwhile in Appalachia, Ala.-based Diversified Energy has discovered a few gems all its own with a bolt-on package of producing and midstream assets that will expand its growth in the production of coal mine methane. The $45 million deal with Summit Natural Resources comes with 300 producing wells in Va., and W.V., and 265 producing coal methane wells in Ala., that qualify for Environmental Credit generation. Diversified, which owns the nation’s largest volume of natural gas wells (more than 70,000 as of last August), operates in the Marcellus/Utica, Haynesville, Cotton Valley, Barnett, Anadarko, and Eagle Ford.