Growth in ethane… EIA

From the EIA’s excellent Today in Energy:

”U.S. production of ethane, a hydrocarbon gas liquid (HGL) produced primarily in natural gas processing plants, has grown rapidly since 2013. Production has nearly doubled from 0.95 million barrels per day (b/d) in the first quarter of 2013 to 1.85 million b/d in the first quarter of 2021. In our Short-Term Energy Outlook, we forecast ethane production to continue to grow in response to a growing U.S. petrochemical industry and rising ethane exports to petrochemical plants around the world, reaching 2.6 million b/d by the fourth quarter of 2022.

U.S. demand for ethane has been growing steadily as a result of capacity expansions of ethylene crackers in the petrochemical industry, which use ethane as a feedstock. Ethylene is a basic chemical used to produce plastics and resins. We estimate that the U.S. petrochemical industry expanded its capacity to produce ethylene from almost 27 million metric tons per year (mt/y) in the first quarter of 2013 (when the first capacity additions to ethylene crackers in over a decade came online) to almost 40 million mt/y in 2020. This growth in ethylene capacity caused domestic demand for ethane as a feedstock to grow from 960,000 b/d in the first quarter of 2013 to 1.83 million b/d in the fourth quarter of 2020.”