Bushton Gas Plant, Kansas

Bushton is a national gas hub at a transition point between the gas production areas of the south, and the markets in the north, where colder temperatures and larger populations consume most of the gas produced in the country. The gas plant on the southern end of the site is the Northern Natural Gas Company’s Bushton Station, a processing and compressing station on one of the largest interstate natural gas pipeline systems in the US. The company, once owned by Enron, and now owned by Berkshire Hathaway, has 14,000 miles of pipelines, running from West Texas to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The north part of the plant site is mostly operated by Oneok, a large midstream gas company based in Oklahoma, engaged in gathering, processing, storing, and transporting gas over its national pipeline network, totaling 38,000 miles of pipe. It operates major facilities like the salt dome storage caverns at Mont Belvieu, Texas, and the Lonesome Creek Processing Plant in North Dakota. Oneok’s operations at Bushton include a large natural gas liquids fractionation plant, recently expanded to service gas from the Bakken shale region.