Liam Denning, Columnist

Energy Transfer Thanks You For Your Generosity

Raising money at such a high cost almost defeats the purpose of being an MLP.

August 16, 2017 at 12:30 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

A "Pipeline Construction Ahead" sign is seen on the side of the road near an Energy Transfer Partners LP construction site for the Sunoco Inc. Mariner East 2 natural gas liquids pipeline project near Morgantown, Pennsylvania, U.S. on Aug. 4, 2017. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection has issued four notices of violation after "inadvertent" spills of drilling fluids associated with horizontal directional drilling for the project.

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Investors gave a thumbs up on Tuesday to Energy Transfer Partners LP's decision to raise as much as $1.16 billion by issuing new units. They just happened to express their enthusiasm by driving up the price of a different stock, Energy Transfer Equity LP:

Energy Transfer Equity is, of course, the parent of what is variously called the Energy Transfer group, complex or empire. The reason the parent's units finished Tuesday up 4 percent is the same reason Energy Transfer Partners fell by 5 percent. Therein lies another cautionary chapter in the continuing saga known as the overhaul of the master limited partnerships sector.