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Plains All American Pipeline, L.P.
Plains All American Pipeline owns and operates pipelines, storage terminals and gathering systems that move crude oil and natural gas liquids across the U.S. and Canada.
Plains All American Pipeline is one of the big toll-road operators of North American oil. It doesn't drill for crude or sell gasoline at the pump. Instead, it owns the pipes, storage tanks and terminals that move crude oil and natural gas liquids from where they come out of the ground to the refineries and export docks where they're actually wanted.
The business works a lot like a toll bridge. Producers pay Plains to gather oil from their wells and ship it down the company's pipelines, and traders and refiners pay to park barrels in its storage tanks or move them through its terminals. Most of this money comes as fixed fees rather than bets on the price of oil, which is why Plains is often described as a midstream company: it sits in the middle, collecting a steady cut for connecting the two ends.
That said, it isn't purely a pipe-and-tank business. A large trading arm buys and sells physical crude oil, and that piece makes real money when markets move but can lose money when they don't. Plains has also been on a long campaign to clean up its balance sheet, selling assets and paying down debt. It's a master limited partnership, which means it pays out most of its cash to unitholders, so income investors like it. The trade-off is that its fate is tied to how much oil gets drilled and shipped in places like the Permian Basin of West Texas and New Mexico, so a slowdown in drilling eventually means less oil flowing through those toll booths.
Saved answer · last researched 15 Nov 2026