Natural Gas Liquids Explained: US Output 2015-2025

EIA counts 2,743,177 thousand barrels of natural gas liquids from U.S. gas processing plants in 2025, about 7.52 million barrels a day. Natural gas liquids (NGLs) are the hydrocarbons heavier than methane that plants strip out of raw gas: ethane, propane, normal butane, isobutane and natural gasoline. Ethane was the largest at 1,137,572 thousand barrels, 41.5% of the total.

Ten years earlier, in 2015, the same plants produced 1,219,949 thousand barrels, and propane, not ethane, was the biggest product by a margin of about five million barrels. That was the only year from 1990 through 2025 in which gas plant propane topped ethane; ethane took the lead back in 2016 and has held it since. Exports grew faster still: from 352,618 thousand barrels in 2015 to 1,123,805 thousand in 2025, a factor of 3.2. Ethane's floor price is set by gas: at the 2025 Henry Hub average of $3.52 per MMBtu, a gallon of ethane left in pipeline gas was worth about 23.3 cents for its heat alone.

Five molecules separated from one gas stream

Raw gas from a well is mostly methane, mixed with heavier hydrocarbons that condense into liquids under pressure or when cooled. EIA defines natural gas liquids as the hydrocarbons separated from the gas as liquids by absorption, condensation, adsorption or other methods in gas processing or cycling plants. The plant sells the remaining methane-rich gas into pipelines and sends the liquids, usually as a mixed stream, to a fractionator that splits them into the separate products. The products are distinguished by carbon count, and each step up the chain raises the boiling point and the energy packed into a barrel.

The boiling points explain most of the logistics. Ethane boils at about minus 127 degrees Fahrenheit, so it stays liquid only under high pressure or deep refrigeration, and moving it takes purpose-built pipelines, storage and tankers. Propane and the butanes boil much closer to ordinary temperatures, so moderate pressure keeps them liquid, which is what makes them portable fuels in tanks and cylinders. Natural gasoline, a mix of pentanes and heavier molecules, is the heaviest of the five and the closest to an ordinary liquid fuel. The heat content column runs the same direction: a barrel of natural gasoline carries 1.67 times the energy of a barrel of ethane, because a barrel of a heavier molecule holds more carbon and hydrogen.

EIA groups these five products with refinery-made olefins (ethylene, propylene and the butylenes) under the wider label hydrocarbon gas liquids. Natural gas plant liquids account for most U.S. hydrocarbon gas liquids production, in EIA's words, and fall entirely into the alkane family; refineries supply the rest of the alkanes and all of the olefins EIA reports. The agency lists the uses for the group as petrochemical feedstock for plastics and synthetic rubber, fuel for heating, cooking and drying, transportation fuel, additives for motor gasoline, and diluent for moving heavy crude. Measured as product supplied, hydrocarbon gas liquids were 1,434,122 thousand barrels in 2025, or 18.9% of all U.S. petroleum product supplied.

Gas plant output by product, 2015 to 2025

Total output grew every single year in the table, including 2020, when U.S. dry gas production slipped from 33,899,021 to 33,811,129 million cubic feet. Gas plants produced 2.25 times as much in 2025 as in 2015. Ethane grew fastest, by a factor of 2.76, which is why its share of the barrel climbed from 33.8% to 41.5%. Propane roughly doubled, by a factor of 2.02, and so did natural gasoline (2.05) and normal butane (2.14). Isobutane lagged at 1.62.

Year-to-year steps were uneven. The largest single jump came in 2018, when total output rose by 214,111 thousand barrels, 15.5%, and ethane alone added 104,903 thousand. EIA's pricing notes date the demand shift behind that jump to late 2017, when new petrochemical projects and newly built ethane export capacity were completed. Only two products shrank in any year of the series: normal butane, from 121,703 thousand barrels in 2015 to 107,339 thousand in 2016, and isobutane, from 157,522 thousand in 2020 to 151,626 thousand in 2021.

In barrels per day, the 2025 figure is 7,516 thousand: 3,117 thousand of ethane, 2,307 thousand of propane, 890 thousand of natural gasoline, 715 thousand of normal butane and 486 thousand of isobutane. Those are the numbers that sit beside crude oil production in the national balance; the U.S. oil production versus consumption breakdown shows how they turn crude-only self-sufficiency into a net export position on total petroleum.

The line that is not in the total

From 2023 EIA's gas plant table carries an extra row, condensate and scrubber oil: 15,667 thousand barrels in 2023, 54,857 thousand in 2024 and 56,091 thousand in 2025. Adding the five products reproduces the published NGL total exactly, so this row sits outside it. The same table also shows two older aggregates, pentanes plus and liquefied petroleum gases, only through 2021; from 2022 the product detail replaces them. Anyone summing the rows of the EIA page should take the five product lines, not every line on screen.

More liquid in every cubic foot

Dividing ethane output by U.S. dry gas production gives a rough measure of how much ethane is being pulled out of the gas stream. Dry gas is what remains after processing, so the ratio is not a recovery rate in the engineering sense, but its direction is informative.

The ratio nearly doubled, from 15.2 barrels of ethane per million cubic feet of dry gas in 2015 to 29.0 in 2025, and rose in every year but 2019. Two things push it up and the data cannot separate them. One is a wetter gas mix: more of U.S. gas now comes from oil-directed wells in the Permian Basin, whose associated gas is rich in liquids. EIA reported that the Texas Inland and New Mexico refining districts, which span the Permian, produced 63 percent of U.S. ethane in 2024. The other is recovery: plants choosing to extract more of the ethane that is in the gas rather than reject it. The 2019 dip, the only fall in the ratio, came in a year when ethane production still rose but dry gas rose faster. For basin detail, the Permian production outlook covers the associated gas side.

Where the barrels go: exports by product

Exports took 29% of the gas plant barrel in 2015 and between 40 and 43 percent in every year from 2020 to 2025. The mix inside that total is lopsided. Propane exports of 647,947 thousand barrels in 2025, about 1,775 thousand barrels a day, equal 77% of gas plant propane output. That comparison overstates the share a little, because refineries also make propane and their barrels are in the export figure too. Normal butane is similar, at 76%. Isobutane barely leaves the country: 2,104 thousand barrels exported against 177,550 thousand produced.

Ethane is the domestic product. Exports rose from 23,619 thousand barrels in 2015 to 210,694 thousand in 2025, almost nine times as much, yet that was still only 18.5% of 2025 ethane production. Most ethane is consumed at home: product supplied, EIA's measure of consumption, was 920,212 thousand barrels in 2025, 81% of production. EIA describes U.S. ethane consumption as almost exclusively petrochemical, feedstock for steam crackers that make ethylene. Natural gasoline sits between the two groups, with 20% of 2025 output exported; one domestic use EIA documents in its ethanol accounting is as denaturant for fuel ethanol.

Who buys the ethane? In its March 2025 review of 2024, EIA put China at 46 percent of U.S. ethane exports, followed by Canada (15 percent), India (13 percent) and Norway (9 percent), and credited low U.S. ethane prices relative to other cracker feedstocks for the record. That article gave 2024 exports as 492,000 barrels a day from the Petroleum Supply Monthly. The annual series in Table 4, published after revision, works out to 487 thousand barrels a day for the leap year 2024. Monthly first prints and revised annual figures differ by a few percent; quote the annual series for history and the monthly data for the latest months, and say which one is used.

The broader export picture, including crude, is in the U.S. crude oil exports guide. One comparison is worth making here: in 2025 the United States exported 1,123,805 thousand barrels of NGLs against 1,445,867 thousand barrels of crude oil, so NGLs were about 78% of the crude export volume, counted in barrels. Counted in energy the gap is wider, because an NGL barrel carries less heat than a crude barrel (Table 7 below).

Ethane rejection: when a liquid is worth more as gas

A gas processor does not have to recover all the ethane in the stream. It can leave much of it in the residue gas, where it raises the gas's heat content and is sold at the natural gas price per million Btu. EIA calls this ethane rejection, and its explanation of ethane pricing is short: from mid-2012, as U.S. ethane production outran domestic petrochemical demand, ethane prices began to track natural gas, because processors had no alternative market and could leave the ethane in pipeline gas, which set ethane prices at the natural gas heating value. Since late 2017, with new crackers and export capacity, EIA says ethane prices have moved away from that link and are bracketed by propane at the top and natural gas at the bottom.

The bottom of that bracket can be calculated from public numbers. The heat-value floor is the price of gas per million Btu times the million Btu in a barrel of ethane. With EIA's factor of 2.783 million Btu per barrel, the unit chain is:

Below that floor, a processor would earn more by leaving ethane in the gas than by recovering it, even before paying to move and fractionate it. Table 5 applies the chain to every annual Henry Hub average from 2015 to 2025, with propane's heat value at the same gas price for comparison.

Over these eleven years the floor ranged from 13.5 cents a gallon in 2020, when Henry Hub averaged $2.03, to 42.7 cents in 2022, when it averaged $6.45. In seven of the eleven years it sat between about 14.5 and 21 cents. The 2022 figure shows why rejection math matters in a gas price spike: Henry Hub more than tripled between 2020 and 2022, and the floor rose by the same factor, and an ethane price that does not keep up pushes recovery toward the uneconomic side. Ethane output still grew in 2022, by 256 thousand barrels a day, which suggests that by then cracker and export demand was pulling ethane prices up with gas. Annual averages hide the months in which the opposite happened.

Reading 2024 against the floor

EIA published a dated ethane price comparison for 2024. Ethane at Mont Belvieu, Texas, the main pricing hub for natural gas plant liquids, averaged under 20 cents a gallon for the year, which EIA put at approximately $3 per MMBtu, and 25 cents a gallon in December, which EIA put at $3.70 per MMBtu. The nearest gas hub, the Houston Ship Channel, averaged $1.86 per MMBtu for 2024 and $2.66 in December.

Converted with the same chain, $1.86 gas puts ethane's heat value at 12.3 cents a gallon, and $2.66 puts it at 17.6 cents. So in 2024 ethane traded at a premium to its heat value of up to about 7.7 cents a gallon on the annual figures (EIA gives the annual price only as under 20 cents) and about 7.4 cents in December. In dollars per MMBtu, the December gap was roughly $1.11 using the 2.783 factor ($3.77 for 25 cents, a little above EIA's rounded $3.70). Whether that premium was enough to recover a given barrel depended on what it cost that plant to deliver the ethane to Mont Belvieu, which leads to the parts of the calculation the floor leaves out.

EIA's own summary of the decision is direct. When ethane prices are high relative to natural gas prices, plant operators can recover more ethane; when the two are closer, more ethane can be left in the gas stream and sold for its heat value. Ethane production rose every year in Table 5, so on annual data the U.S. has been in net recovery mode throughout, with rejection a margin that expands and contracts by region and by month.

What the floor leaves out

The heat-value floor is the price at which a processor is indifferent before costs. A real recovery decision adds at least four things, and each one raises the ethane price needed to justify recovery.

• Transport and fractionation fees. A recovered barrel has to travel as part of a mixed liquids stream to a fractionator, often hundreds of miles away, and be separated there. Those fees are set by contract and are not published as a public index.
• The local gas price, not Henry Hub. A plant compares ethane's value with the gas price where the residue gas is sold. EIA reported that spot prices at the Waha Hub, near Permian production, were below zero on 46 percent of trading days in 2024 up to early September, as output outran pipeline capacity. A gas price that low pushes the rejection floor toward zero and favors recovery. Henry Hub is used in Table 5 because it is the national benchmark with a long public record; the Henry Hub explainer covers how regional prices relate to it.
• Pipeline heat content limits. Ethane left in the gas raises its Btu content, and pipelines accept gas only within a heat content range. A plant cannot reject unlimited ethane, so even at a low ethane price some must be recovered.
• Plant design and contracts. Some older plants cannot recover much ethane at any price, and some processing contracts fix who takes the ethane. The price signal works at the margin, on plants able to switch.

Because the fees are private, the clearest way to show their effect is an illustration with stated inputs. Table 6 adds a hypothetical delivery cost of 5 or 10 cents a gallon to the heat-value floor at four gas prices. The fees are assumptions chosen to show the arithmetic, not observed tariffs.

Each dollar on the gas price moves the floor by 6.63 cents a gallon, so the rule of thumb is about 6.6 cents of ethane per dollar of gas. At $3 gas and a 10 cent delivery cost, ethane needs to fetch close to 30 cents a gallon at the hub before recovery pays. At $5 gas the same plant needs about 43 cents. The calculation also runs the other way for anyone reading a market report: an ethane quote divided by 6.6 cents gives the gas price at which that ethane would be worth only its heat.

How much energy is in the NGL barrel

Barrels are the unit EIA reports, but NGL barrels are light. Multiplying each 2025 product volume by its heat content gives 9.79 billion million Btu (quadrillion Btu, or quads) for all gas plant liquids, an average of 3.57 million Btu per barrel. EIA used 5.800 million Btu per barrel for U.S. crude oil production through 2014 (it now derives the factor from API gravity), so by that yardstick an average NGL barrel carries roughly three fifths of the energy of a crude barrel.

By volume, ethane is 41.5% of the barrel. By energy it is 32.4%, smaller than propane's 33.1%. Rank the products by heat instead of barrels and propane comes first. That matters whenever NGLs are added to crude to describe U.S. oil supply: a barrel count flatters the liquids. The heating fuel cost per MMBtu comparison applies the same per-Btu thinking to propane against heating oil and gas at the retail level.

One more ratio puts rejection in scale. The 2025 ethane output holds about 3.17 billion MMBtu. U.S. dry gas production that year was 39,287,583 million cubic feet; at EIA's sample factor of 1,036 Btu per cubic foot, that is 39,287,583 MMcf × 1,036 MMBtu per MMcf = 40.7 billion MMBtu. The ethane, if left in the gas, would have added roughly 7.8% to the energy content of U.S. dry gas. Full rejection is not physically possible, for the pipeline reasons above, but the ratio shows why swings in ethane recovery register in gas supply data, and why the two markets watch each other. At the 2025 Henry Hub average of $3.52, the heat value of the whole year's ethane was about $11.1 billion. For conversions between Mcf, MMBtu and therms, see the natural gas units guide.

NGL, NGPL, HGL, LPG: labels that get swapped

Much of the confusion around natural gas liquids comes from four overlapping acronyms, each used precisely by EIA and loosely elsewhere.

The practical trap is mixing a gas plant production figure with an HGL consumption or export figure. Propane exports, for example, include refinery propane, so dividing them by gas plant propane overstates how much of the gas plant's output leaves the country. The second trap is lease condensate. EIA's definition puts lease condensate inside the broad NGL term, and its glossary describes it as light liquids, mostly pentanes and heavier, recovered from lease separators at gas wells that normally enter the crude oil stream after production. It is not in the gas plant series, so a total of "crude and NGL" production built from crude output plus gas plant liquids counts condensate once, on the crude side.

The third is units. Gas plant output is reported in barrels, the Henry Hub price in dollars per MMBtu, and ethane quotes in cents per gallon. Every comparison on this page converts explicitly: thousand barrels × MMBtu per barrel gives thousand MMBtu; $/MMBtu × MMBtu per barrel gives $/barrel; dividing by 42 gives $/gallon. Skip a step and the error is rarely small. Using the propane factor for ethane, for instance, overstates ethane's heat value by 38%.

A fourth, smaller one: always state which heat content factors a calculation uses. The factors used here, ethane 2.783, propane 3.841, normal butane 4.353, isobutane 4.183 and natural gasoline 4.638, are the ones documented in the September 2026 Monthly Energy Review, which EIA bases on NIST enthalpy of combustion data and API liquid densities. EIA's Btu page gives propane as 91,452 Btu per gallon, which is the same 3.841 million Btu per barrel after multiplying by 42.

Reading next year's data release

EIA updates the annual gas plant series once a year; the October 30, 2026 release carries 2025, and the page lists August 31, 2027 as the next release date. Monthly figures arrive sooner in the Petroleum Supply Monthly. When a new year lands, the tables above can be rerun against it like this.

1. Confirm the five products still sum to the published total, and ignore aggregate rows such as condensate and scrubber oil.
2. Compute ethane per MMcf of dry gas (Table 3). A rise with flat or falling gas output points to more recovery or wetter gas.
3. Put the year's average Henry Hub price through the 2.783 ÷ 42 chain (Table 5) and compare it with any dated ethane price EIA publishes.
4. Divide exports by production for each product (Table 4), remembering that propane and butane exports include refinery barrels.

The order of the products is also a quick test of a source. Any recent table that shows propane larger than ethane in U.S. gas plant output is either describing 2015, the one exception since 1990, or is using a different definition. For the price side of the propane line, the most-bought liquid in this group, the next useful stop is the propane prices guide, which follows the same gas plant barrels through Mont Belvieu to a home tank. The rest of the gas chain is collected in the natural gas section of the deep-dive library.

Data and sources: U.S. Energy Information Administration, Natural Gas Plant Field Production (U.S., annual, by product, release of October 30, 2026) and its definitions, sources and notes; U.S. Exports of Crude Oil and Petroleum Products (annual, release of October 30, 2026); Product Supplied (annual, U.S.); Henry Hub Natural Gas Spot Price (annual, release of October 28, 2026); U.S. Dry Natural Gas Production (annual); Monthly Energy Review, September 2026, Appendix A thermal conversion factor source documentation; British thermal units (Btu) (1,036 Btu per cubic foot of natural gas; 91,452 Btu per gallon of propane); Hydrocarbon gas liquids explained (last updated December 26, 2023) and Prices for hydrocarbon gas liquids (last updated August 1, 2023); Today in Energy, U.S. ethane production, consumption, and exports set new records in 2024 (March 20, 2025; Mont Belvieu ethane and Houston Ship Channel prices for 2024, export destinations, Permian share) and Natural gas pipeline capacity from the Permian Basin is set to increase (September 10, 2024; Waha Hub prices); Energy Glossary, lease condensate. All checked October 31, 2026. Per-day rates, shares, ratios, heat contents and break-even values are this page's arithmetic.