ONEOK Partners

In February 2017, parent company ONEOK, Inc. acquired all of the publicly held common units of ONEOK Partners in a stock-for-unit merger (per ONEOK, Inc., February 2017). The entity ceased to exist as a separate publicly traded partnership and was absorbed into ONEOK, Inc., which continued operating the combined midstream and utility assets under a simplified corporate structure.

ONEOK Partners controlled an extensive midstream network including more than 30,000 miles of natural gas and natural gas liquids pipelines, gathering systems, processing plants, fractionation facilities, and storage terminals. Its assets stretched from the Williston Basin and Rocky Mountains through the Mid-Continent to Gulf Coast market hubs at Mont Belvieu, Texas, and Conway, Kansas.

As a master limited partnership, ONEOK Partners was not subject to federal corporate income tax, instead passing substantially all income through to unitholders in the form of quarterly distributions. This structure prioritized cash distributions over retained earnings for reinvestment, which created both a compelling yield investment and periodic tension between maintenance capital expenditure needs and distribution growth until the simplification transaction resolved the conflict.

ONEOK Partners was managed by its general partner, a wholly owned subsidiary of ONEOK, Inc. The incentive distribution rights held by the general partner entitled it to a growing percentage of the partnership's marginal distributable cash as distributions increased, a common MLP governance feature that sometimes disfavored public unitholders at higher distribution tiers.

The partnership's pipelines and processing infrastructure spanned the Mid-Continent region, the Permian Basin in West Texas and New Mexico, the Williston Basin in North Dakota and Montana, and the Rocky Mountain region, with major NGL market connections to the Mont Belvieu complex in Texas and the Conway hub in Kansas.