Mont Belvieu Propane Spot Price: Today's Benchmark

Mont Belvieu, Texas is a small Chambers County town about 30 miles east of Houston that happens to host the largest natural gas liquids fractionation and storage complex in the United States. When a trader, a distributor, or an analyst quotes a propane wholesale price, the number they are almost always referencing is the Mont Belvieu spot price, also written as MB or LST (the LST is Lone Star Texas, the local pipeline tariff designation). The price for the most recent trading day from the U.S. Energy Information Administration daily series sits at the top of this page. The full historical archive runs back to 1991.

Why Mont Belvieu is the benchmark

Two physical facts make Mont Belvieu the price-discovery point for US propane. First, the volume. Industry estimates put the underground salt-dome storage at Mont Belvieu at more than 200 million barrels of NGL capacity across multiple operators, with the largest installations run by Enterprise Products Partners and Targa Resources. That single complex holds a meaningful share of the country's working propane storage at any given moment. Second, the pipeline geography. Every major US propane pipeline either originates at Mont Belvieu (TEPPCO, Dixie, Lone Star), connects to it (Cochin, Mariner East), or prices against it. When a midstream contract is signed for propane delivery in Kansas, the formula is almost certainly Mont Belvieu plus a basis differential rather than a separately-discovered Kansas price.

The Energy Information Administration publishes a daily quote for Mont Belvieu non-LDH (Lone Star pipeline) propane at the EIA daily petroleum prices page. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis mirrors the same series as DPROPANEMBTX, which is what most financial dashboards pull from because the FRED API is more developer-friendly than the EIA endpoint. Both sources publish with a two- to three-business-day lag and are updated by 5pm Eastern most weekdays. The OPIS reference quote, which most retail distributors actually transact against, is built on top of the same physical Mont Belvieu basis but adds a subscription-only daily survey of dealer pricing.

Recent daily quotes

The ten most recent Mont Belvieu daily quotes from the EIA series, pulled into this site at build time. The wholesale benchmark generally moves a few cents day-to-day on inventory and weather updates, with much larger moves on EIA Weekly Petroleum Status Report releases (Wednesdays at 10:30am Eastern) and on cold-snap forecasts.

Source: EIA Mont Belvieu daily petroleum series. Pulled by the site fetch script on the most recent build (page built 2026-05-17).

From spot to retail

A homeowner does not transact at the Mont Belvieu price and never will. The path from a $0.864 spot quote in Chambers County to a residential bill in the low three-dollar range passes through six discrete margin steps, each defended on its own economics. They are worth itemising because the breakdown is the basis for any honest conversation about whether a particular retail quote is fair.

The first step is pipeline transport. Moving a barrel of propane from a Mont Belvieu fractionator to a regional terminal in, for example, Hannibal, Missouri costs roughly 4 to 7 cents per gallon via the TEPPCO mainline, depending on contract tier and load factor. Pipeline tariffs are published with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and are public. Second, regional terminal storage. The propane sits in above-ground or mounded storage at a terminal until the local distributor schedules a truck. Storage fees vary widely but typically run 1 to 3 cents per gallon per month of fill-cycle storage, often included in the supply contract rather than itemised.

Third, the local distributor markup at the rack. The rack price is the wholesale price at which a propane retailer can buy a tanker truckload at a regional terminal. Rack postings are published daily by OPIS (subscription) and by Argus. The rack-to-Mont-Belvieu basis varies from 5 cents per gallon in the Gulf Coast and Midwest to 30 cents or more in New England during a cold snap. Fourth, tanker truck delivery to the dealer's bulk plant or directly to the customer. A typical fully loaded propane bobtail truck carries 2,800 to 3,200 gallons and the delivery cost spreads across that load. Diesel fuel, driver wages, insurance, and equipment amortisation typically add 8 to 18 cents per gallon depending on route density.

Fifth, dealer overhead and margin. The retail propane business is capital-intensive. A typical residential customer requires a leased tank (a 500-gallon ASME tank costs the dealer roughly $1,800 to $2,400 installed), regulator service, leak-check visits, a 24-hour emergency call line, and odorant compliance. The dealer recovers that fixed cost across the gallons delivered to that customer, so margins vary inversely with annual usage. A high-usage customer (1,200 gallons per year) sees a lower per-gallon dealer margin than a light-usage customer (300 gallons). Industry surveys (NPGA, Butane-Propane News) put typical net dealer margin at 60 to 110 cents per gallon for residential service. Sixth, regulatory fees and state-level surcharges. Odorant testing, state weights and measures inspections, and where applicable the propane gas association assessment add 1 to 3 cents per gallon.

Add those six margins and the Mont Belvieu spot price of $0.864 per gallon supports a residential retail price in the range of $2.30 to $3.50 per gallon depending on region, route density, and customer-class fixed-cost recovery. That is the band the EIA Weekly Heating Oil and Propane Survey reports each week through the heating season. Our wholesale vs retail breakdown walks through the spread in more detail.

Why the storage matters more than the production

A common confusion is that Mont Belvieu is the benchmark because Texas produces most of the country's propane. That is not quite right. Texas does produce a lot of propane (propane is the C3 fraction of natural gas liquids extracted at gas processing plants), but so do New Mexico, Pennsylvania, North Dakota, Oklahoma and Louisiana. What makes Mont Belvieu the benchmark is the storage. The salt-dome geology beneath Chambers County is well- suited to underground liquid storage, with caverns that are essentially indestructible at the volumes operators run them and highly cycleable (a cavern can be filled and emptied many times per year without geological issue). That storage capacity makes Mont Belvieu the buffer between US propane production and domestic-plus-export consumption, and the buffer is where the price clears.

The Conway, Kansas hub plays a similar role for the Midwest, with its own spot quote published by OPIS. Conway propane historically traded at a discount to Mont Belvieu (the Conway-Mont Belvieu differential averaged 5 to 10 cents per gallon below over the 2015-2020 period per EIA), reflecting the cheaper Mid-Continent shale-NGL feedstock. From around 2022 the differential narrowed and at times inverted as Cochin pipeline flows tightened and export demand pulled propane into Gulf Coast terminals. For residential retail purposes, however, Mont Belvieu is the reference even for Conway-served distributors because OPIS publishes both and most contracts index to Mont Belvieu by convention.

Mont Belvieu terminal capacity

The Mont Belvieu storage and fractionation complex is run by several midstream operators. Enterprise Products Partners is the largest operator with multiple fractionators (the company reports more than 1.1 million barrels per day of NGL fractionation capacity across the complex). Targa Resources operates the second largest set of fractionators (CBF I, II, and III plus the more recent Train 8 and 9 expansions, with reported combined capacity above 450,000 barrels per day). Phillips 66 (formerly DCP Midstream) and ONEOK each have additional fractionation and storage. Capacity at Mont Belvieu has roughly doubled since 2015 on the back of US shale NGL growth and waterborne LPG exports out of Gulf Coast terminals (Targa Galena Park, Enterprise Houston Ship Channel, Phillips 66 Freeport).

The bottleneck on a given day is rarely fractionation capacity. It is usually pipeline or marine-loading capacity downstream. When waterborne LPG export demand pulls hard (high Asian and European differentials), Mont Belvieu fills more slowly because barrels are drawn out to ship terminals before they can sit in storage. When domestic heating demand spikes, the opposite happens and storage draws down. The daily spot price reflects whichever pressure is dominant on a given trading day. Our page on US LPG exports walks through why this matters for residential retail.

OPIS, Argus, and EIA

Three reference prices are commonly cited for Mont Belvieu propane and they are not identical. OPIS (Oil Price Information Service, now part of Dow Jones) publishes a daily Mont Belvieu spot assessment based on dealer surveys plus reported trades. This is the most-cited number in physical propane trading and the rack basis most distributors quote against. Argus Media publishes a similar daily Mont Belvieu propane price, slightly different methodology, marginally different number on any given day. The EIA daily series referenced above is a third independent source, freely available, and the one this site uses because it is the only public reference. For deeper market work, paid OPIS or Argus access is the standard. For a homeowner deciding whether to fill a tank this week, the EIA series is sufficient.

How to use the Mont Belvieu price as a homeowner

A homeowner cannot transact at Mont Belvieu. What the price tells you is the direction of the wholesale market. If Mont Belvieu spot has rallied 20 cents per gallon over the last two weeks, your retail price quote will probably rise within four to six weeks as distributor contracts roll. If Mont Belvieu has dropped 20 cents, you can reasonably push back on a distributor quote that has not moved or call a competitor. The lag is real (dealers buy ahead and protect inventory cost), but the directional signal is reliable. For multi-month decisions about pre-buy contracts or summer fill timing, our summer buying page and seasonal-patterns page combine the Mont Belvieu signal with the longer-term residential retail history.

Related pages

• National wholesale propane price per gallon (residential supplier basis)
• Wholesale vs retail: the spread, broken down
• How US LPG exports move the propane price
• HD-5 propane specification and consumer-grade pricing
• Polar vortex 2014 spike: when storage drained too fast
• National residential propane price (this week)

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