North America needs over $1 trillion in midstream investment over 30 years; Texas leads demand

July 20, 2026

Across the U.S. and Canada, Texas will require the most infrastructure spending to meet energy demand over the next 30 years, but some technologies likely will be left out, according to a new report.

The Interstate Natural Gas Association of America Foundation, with help from the University of Houston, Wood PLC and Esmia Consultants, studied what it would cost to build enough midstream infrastructure to support energy demand through 2052.

The report looked at two different cases: the reference case and the low-carbon scenario. The reference case only includes policies that were in place by April 1, 2025, plus those in H.R. 1, the “big, beautiful bill” Trump signed into law last summer. The low-carbon scenario includes state, federal and global policies that are set to be rolled out in the next 25 years.

Texas massively dominates both cases. The state would need about $255 billion of investment in the reference case and about $358 billion in the low-carbon scenario.

In either case, total midstream investment required in the U.S. and Canada would reach over $1 trillion.

“This is what the study says we need; building it is a different problem,” Paul Doucette, hydrogen program officer at the University of Houston and lead researcher on the report, told the Houston Business Journal. "Twelve (million) to 24 million workers, where are they coming from? Permit reform, community opposition — what in the industry are often referred to as nontechnical risks — they have to be mitigated; they have to be resolved in order for the industry actually to be able to build this infrastructure and therefore capitalize on the trillion dollars."

For Texas, the largest difference between the reference case and the low-carbon scenario comes from its liquefied natural gas exports. In the low-carbon scenario, the study expects there will be a global push to reduce the use of coal and replace it with natural gas, much of which will come from Texas’ Gulf Coast.

Surprisingly, in the reference case, Louisiana required about $130 billion of investments into LNG terminals, while Texas only needed $49 billion. However, LNG was still one of the technologies that required the most investments in Texas.

In the low-carbon scenario, those numbers switched. Texas would need about $130 billion in LNG investment, while Louisiana would need just $32 billion.

The other technologies that would require the most investment in Texas for either case were natural gas pipelines, natural gas liquids pipelines and oil pipelines.

“The demand for natural gas and for natural gas infrastructure is just enormously robust, almost regardless of the circumstances over the next 29 years,” Doucette said.

However, the investment expectations for low-carbon technologies are very different in Texas compared with the U.S. overall. Added hydrogen pipeline capacity in Texas actually would be less in the low-carbon scenario than in the reference scenario, even though the rest of the country would see a huge increase — adding more than 77,000 tonnes per day of capacity in the low-carbon case but only about 25,000 tonnes per day in the reference case.

Similarly, Texas would add approximately 27,000 additional tonnes per day of carbon dioxide pipeline capacity in the low-carbon scenario — only slightly more than the roughly 24,000 additional tonnes per day in the reference case. However, carbon capture and storage would grow massively in the rest of the country, with 1.5 million tonnes per day of added pipeline capacity in the low-carbon scenario versus 102,000 tonnes per day added in the reference case. 

“Texas doesn't have any plans or likelihood for emission controls. You get to a place like California, where they're really ratcheting down their emissions policies, (and) they're going to require more carbon capture. They're going to be looking for more hydrogen as an offset against diesel fuel. … Texas right now, not so much,” Doucette said.

That being said, Texas and the Houston area specifically already have a significant amount of carbon dioxide pipeline infrastructure compared to the rest of the country. With the purchase of Denbury Inc. for $4.9 billion in 2023, Spring-based ExxonMobil Holdings Corp. (NYSE: XOM) acquired an extensive carbon dioxide transportation network along the Gulf Coast, which the company plans to use for its other carbon storage projects in the region. Exxon has CCS projects planned from Baytown to Yazoo City, Mississippi, which are connected by the carbon dioxide pipelines formerly owned by Denbury.