Oil. It’s gone up again. Fifty percent in a month, they say. A hundred dollars a barrel. Seems excessive, doesn’t it? Like someone misplaced a decimal point. Of course, it’s not a mistake. It’s Iran. Or the possibility of Iran. So it goes.
Everyone’s wringing their hands about the Strait of Hormuz. Perfectly understandable. But here’s a thought, a little lifeboat in the storm: pipelines. Not the oil in the pipelines, mind you. The pipelines themselves. They don’t much care what the oil costs. They care if the oil moves. A simple distinction, really. And a potentially profitable one.
Four outfits, these pipeline partnerships, seem to have noticed this. They get paid a fee for volume. Like a tollbooth operator on the information superhighway, except it’s oil. More oil means more money. Less drama. A nice arrangement, if you can get it.
1. Enterprise Products Partners (EPD 1.33%)
Enterprise. They’ve been at this a while. Twenty-seven years of steady payouts. Through recessions, oil crashes, even that unpleasantness with the pandemic. That’s a record. They move a lot of stuff. Natural gas, NGLs, everything. And they just keep moving it. The price goes up, they move more. The price goes down, they still move it. A comforting thought, isn’t it? Currently yielding 5.88%. It’s not going to make you a king, but it’s honest work.
They’re expanding, of course. Adding capacity. Always adding capacity. It’s what they do. Because someone, somewhere, will always need to move something. The CEO, a sensible man named Jim Teague, puts it plainly: there’s demand. That’s all. Just demand. Units are up 17.29% year-to-date. Not bad for a world teetering on the brink.
2. Energy Transfer (ET 0.69%)
Energy Transfer. The biggest of the bunch, revenue-wise. Eighty-five billion dollars. A lot of money. They’ve locked in deals with data centers, of all things. Supplying natural gas to keep the servers humming. The irony isn’t lost on me. We build these digital worlds, then need to burn fossil fuels to power them. A circle, really. Yielding 7.07%. They had a bit of a hiccup with earnings, some accounting adjustments, but the underlying business seems sound enough.
3. MPLX (MPLX 1.66%)
MPLX. They’re growing the fastest. Raising payouts by 12.5% year-over-year. Ambitious. Building pipelines to the Gulf Coast. Exporting LPG. Sending it off to Europe and Asia. Filling the void, they hope. Yielding 7.4%. It’s a gamble, of course. Relying on global demand. But what isn’t these days?
4. Western Midstream Partners (WES 1.25%)
Western Midstream. They’re focused on the Delaware Basin. A lot of oil and gas there. They’ve even gotten into the water business. Moving produced water. It’s a messy business, oil and gas. But someone has to deal with the mess. Yielding 8.97%. They’re a bit more concentrated than the others. A bit more vulnerable. But still, a yield of almost 9%. It’s enough to make you think.
The Common Thread
They all get paid for volume. It’s remarkably simple. Take-or-pay contracts. Fixed fees. A producer who committed to capacity pays whether they ship or not. It’s a beautiful thing, really. A little island of stability in a chaotic world. When Hormuz gets disrupted, and oil prices soar, these pipelines just keep flowing. They don’t care about geopolitics. They care about physics. And physics, thankfully, is remarkably reliable. So it goes.
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2026-03-19 09:02